Projects
Consuls between the Nation and Global Capital: A Comparative History of Belgian, Italian, and U.S. Economic Diplomacy in Ottoman Salonika, 1823–1912. University of Antwerp
Dead End: an economic and cultural history of Japan in the age of the great depression 1927 - 1937 (JapanGreatDepression). KU Leuven
Housing Economies of Scale: An Architectural Assessment of Three Historic Case Studies in London. KU Leuven
It is largely assumed that large-scale housing has been an outright failure. The typical images that we have of mass housing have been derived from canonical but polarising projects, the wet dreams of megalomaniacal architectural figures and demonising rhetoric. Since large-scale, coordinated housing solutions are politically incorrect, the types of actions celebrated today tend towards the small: self-help models which risk only serving to ...
The impact of economic growth revisited: Comparing rural market and subaltern economies in the premodern Low Countries (1650-1800) KU Leuven
Lords, land, and labour. The influence of seigneuries on economic development in the late medieval Low Countries (c. 1350 – c. 1550) Ghent University
This project probes the impact of political elites on pre-modern economies. The central concept is the seigneurie, the institution that cemented the rural elite’s power over populations in the countryside. Seigneuries impacted upon the rural economy through their powers of surplus extraction that proceeded from coercion rather than market exchange. Yet, while elite rent-seeking infringed on the income of the peasantry, the macro-economic ...
Economic growth and material living standards in a transistion economy: Venice (1600-1800). University of Antwerp
Economic growth and inequality. Explaining divergent growth paths in pre-industrial Europe (late Middle Ages – 19th century) Ghent University
This proposal aims to give a new impulse to the stronger tendency in social and economic research to look at the past in order to deal with contemporary questions of unequal economic growth and prosperity. We will study the mechanisms behind the diverging growth paths in medieval and early modern Europe, which are at the basis of the current global economic model. Four test areas will be studied in a comparative way.