Partners

The IISH was established by the pioneer of modern economic history in the Netherlands, Nicolaas W. Posthumus, in 1935.
He also set up the Netherlands Economic History Archive (NEHA), which is now part of IISH. The institute is well-known worldwide for its rich collections on national and international social movements (the international labour movement in particular). Since 1979, the Institute has operated under the umbrella of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). It has a very successful socio-economic history research department with a wide network of research groups around the world. In the past decade it has developed a robust digitisation infrastructure to support the management of digital collections and to facilitate e-research. This infrastructure also accommodates the needs of related institutions such as the Press Museum. The construction of high-quality datasets that allow for global comparative research in social and economic history is one of the institute’s most important strategic actions for the coming years. The research staff of the IISH is currently focusing on two large, interrelated projects: Global Labor History and Global Economic History. Both projects require a massive amount of data on highly diverse indicators that, in conjunction, will provide a new long-term perspective on current social and economic problems associated with globalisation. The IISH actively supports and develops both existing and new collaboratories of specialists around the world, who collect, standardise, and share their data. The enhanced infrastructure of research data constitutes a vital asset in global social and economic research. The IISH provides a number of datahubs (Wages and Prices, Global Labour Relations), as well as the infrastructure for new services such as the e-collaboratory platform and the collective Clio Infra services.
DANS is the national organisation responsible for storing and providing permanent access to research data from the Humanities and Social Sciences in the Netherlands.
It is a "joint venture" of two major national research organisations in the Netherlands: the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). Currently approximately 15 permanent and 15 temporary staff members are working on both recurrent tasks (e.g. acquisition of datasets, data curation, and training and consultation) and research & development projects with a focus on the long term longevity of scientific datasets. DANS staff have been involved in many R&D projects and have world class knowledge on data curation, preservation and dissemination. Research and development projects include: EASY - Electronic Archiving SYstem: a system to accommodate data up- and downloading by researchers for preservation and dissemination purposes; MIXED - Migrating to Intermediate XML for Electronic Data: development of an archival format (and software) for databases and spreadsheets to allow for efficient long term preservation and accessibility of datasets; Persistent Identifiers: a research project to create an overview of the different solutions for persistent identifiers (this is an essential ingredient for setting up durable connections between datasets and/or publications); DARIAH - Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities: an international project that aims to set up a European infrastructure for data curation, preservation and dissemination. DANS will provide long-term storage of all Clio Infra datasets in its EASY system.
Utrecht University (UU) is the largest university in the Netherlands with c. 28,000 students and c. 8,000 members of staff.
The UU-partner of Clio Infra is the Research Institute for History and Culture of the Faculty of Humanities, and in particular the research group on social and economic history led by Prof. Dr. Jan Luiten van Zanden. This group has established a strong reputation in its field, and specialises in research into the interaction between institutions and socio-economic development. A number of relatively large research projects – mainly funded by the Netherlands Science Foundation and other external funds (such as companies) – are carried out here.
The University of Tübingen enjoys a high reputation world-wide for its focus on humanities and social sciences, as well as medical and life sciences.
At the intersection of these fields lies the economic history of the biological standard of living. Research into this field benefits from the University’s strengths in humanities such as, for example, archaeology and Asia studies, as well as its medical sciences which contribute to the natural science side of the data hub. The University of Tübingen is consistently ranked among the ten leading universities in Germany, and its Economic History Department has generated and supported younger scholars who now teach at universities around the world such as Oxford, Munich, Vienna, Berlin, Southampton, Shantou, Poznan, Dresden, and Bristol.
The University of Groningen has a long academic tradition with a broad range of scientific and scholarly disciplines, organized in ten faculties.
With over 20,000 students and 5,000 staff members it is one of the largest universities in the Netherlands. The Groningen Growth and Development Centre (GGDC) was created in 1992 within the Economics Department by a group of researchers working on comparative analysis of levels of economic performance and differences in growth rates. The activities of the GGDC are primarily in the field of research and are largely based on a range of comprehensive databases on indicators of growth and development, which the GGDC compiles and maintains on a regular basis. Part of the centre’s work is carried out in collaboration with the Economics Program of The Conference Board, which among other things supports the GGDC Total Economy Data Base. The GGDC participates in various programmes funded by the European Commission. Since 2004 the Centre has coordinated the EU KLEMS project on comparative productivity at industry level in the European Union. This is part of the 6th Framework Programme, Priority 8, ‘Policy Support and Anticipating Scientific and Technological Needs’. Since 2005 members of the GGDC coordinate the project ‘An International Historical Database on Economic Growth and Development’, which is funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research. This projects aims to make available historical national accounting data for western Europe, North and South America, and East Asia. Since 2006 the members of the GGDC have participated in GlobalEuroNet, the ESF Research Networking Programme on European Economic History. GGDC is leader of the hub on national accounts.
Bocconi University, Dondena Centre and Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality
University of Bern, Institute of Political Science
University of Tübingen, Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences
Queen's University Management School
University of Groningen, Faculty of Economics and Business
International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam
Editor-in-Chief, KWALON
Georgia Tech, The Sam Nunn School of International Affairs
University of Bern, Institute of Political Science
Utrecht University, Department of History and Art History
International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam
University of Bern, Institute of Political Science
University of Groningen
Utrecht University, Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development
University of Maryland, Department of Government & Politics
University of Colorado at Boulder, Honors Program
International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam
International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam
University of California, Davis
Center for Systemic Peace (CSP)
University College London
Texas Tech University, Department of Political Science
Utrecht University, Department of History and Art History
North Dakota State University, Political Science Faculty
University of Bern, Institute of Political Science
Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government
Utrecht University, Department of History and Art History
Harvard University, Faculty of Arts and Sciences
University of Luxembourg
International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam
University of Tampere
International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam
Radboud University, Faculty of Arts
University of Bern, Institute of Political Science
Utrecht University, Department of History and Art History
International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam
Wageningen University, Department of Social Sciences

In 2010, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) awarded a subsidy to the Clio Infra project, of which Jan Luiten van Zanden was the main applicant and which is hosted by the International Institute of Social History (IISH). Clio Infra has set up a number of interconnected databases containing worldwide data on social, economic, and institutional indicators for the past five centuries, with special attention to the past 200 years. These indicators allow research into long-term development of worldwide economic growth and inequality.

Global inequality is one of the key problems of the contemporary world. Some countries have (recently) become wealthy, other countries have remained poor. New theoretical developments in economics - such as new institutional economics, new economic geography, and new growth theory - and the rise of global economic and social history require such processes to be studied on a worldwide scale. Clio Infra provides datasets for the most important indicators. Economic and social historians from around the world have been working together in thematic collaboratories, in order to collect and share their knowledge concerning the relevant indicators of economic performance and its causes. The collected data have been standardized, harmonized, and stored for future use. New indicators to study inequality have been developed. The datasets are accessible through the Clio Infra portal which also offers possibilities for visualization of the data. Clio Infra offers the opportunity to greatly enhance our understanding of the origins, causes and character of the process of global inequality.