Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk

I am an economic and social historian specializing in the history of labour relations, particularly women’s and children’s work, colonial history, and global history. In 2007, I obtained my PhD in Economic and Social History, with a dissertation on women’s work in the early modern Dutch Republic. I have published in leading economic and social history journals, including the Economic History Review, Feminist Economics, and the International Review of Social History. I have directed several comparative labour history projects on textile workers, child labour, domestic workers, and sex workers.

Currently, I work as Full Professor in the Department of Economic and Social History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. From June 2017 to June 2020, I also held a special professorship in the Comparative History of Gender, Work and Households at Radboud University Nijmegen, a chair enabled by the Unger van Brero Fund.

I am a member of the Advisory Board of the European Social Science History Conference, editor of the Research Data Journal for the Humanities and Social Sciences, and co-chair of the NWO Roundtable for Philosophy, Historical Science and Theology. Until recently, I served on the Editorial Boards of Social Science History, the International Review of Social History, and the Scandinavian Economic History Review. I am also an Honorary Research Fellow at the International Institute of Social History (IISH) and a member of the Steering Committee of the Clio-infra project.

I currently lead the ERC Consolidator Project “Race to the Bottom? Family labour, household livelihood and consumption in the relocation of textile production between ca. 1780 and 1990” (TextileLab). Over the past 250 years, the center of the global cotton textile industry shifted first from Asia to Europe and the United States, and more recently back to Asia. In this project, I investigate this relocation at the macro level from a micro perspective, highlighting the allocation of textile work and consumption at the household level.

Previously, I led the NWO Vidi project Industriousness in an Imperial Economy: Women’s and Children’s Work in the Netherlands and the Netherlands Indies, 1815–1940 at Wageningen University. This project analyzed the connections between the histories of women’s and children’s work in both parts of the Dutch Empire and examined the mutual influences between metropolis and colony. One of its main outcomes was the synthesizing monograph Women, Work and Colonialism.