This Research Alliance between the KNIR and the NWO-funded VICI project Daily Bread. A Comparative Urban History of Early Modern Food Protests, based at the University of Amsterdam and led by Maartje van Gelder, compares early modern food protests in the Netherlands, Italy and the Ottoman Empire. The alliance will consist of research stays and workshops hosted by the KNIR, with the aim of creating a crossover between social, environmental, archival and urban history as well as exchanges between historians and policy workers.
About the project
The Daily Bread project takes on two fundamental historical questions: How have ordinary people shaped politics in the period before democracy? And how has power shaped archives, determining whose histories have been written, and whose have been silenced?
Premodern protest movements have been regarded as having paved the way towards political equality. Yet food protests, integral to the early modern period, are missing from this narrative. These protests, often led by women, are assumed to be motivated by hunger, not politics. The Daily Bread project argues that this is due to archival silencing: contemporary authorities disregarded women as political actors, also in the production of archival sources; in turn, later historians mainly interpreted their involvement as expressing their domestic role. The project will compare food protests between 1500-1800, when climate change caused by the Little Ice Age affected European and Ottoman cities. It will trace the impact of food protests in Dutch, Italian, and Ottoman cities, each with distinct administrative, social, and archival cultures and set in differing environmental contexts. This long-term, comparative perspective will radically revise the dominant narrative of early modern political development.
In its methodology, the project merges social history’s attention for the politically disenfranchised with cultural history’s sensitivity to the impact of power on archives and history-writing. It also draws on insights from environmental and comparative urban history while critically engaging with concepts from food system studies. Its objectives are to 1) recast the debate on how ordinary men and women shaped pre-democratic politics; 2) advance the agenda of comparative urban history; 3) answer environmental historians’ call to examine societal responses to climate change; and 4) help integrate protest into the conceptual framework used by food policy-workers today. Ultimately, the project aims to uncover the power relations at play in the streets, the archive, and the production of history.
About the team
The research team will consist of the project leader, Maartje van Gelder, who is professor of early modern urban history at the University of Amsterdam, one postdoc and two PhD candidates, who will all start in September 2025. Van Gelder is interested in how people and rulers navigated political and social conflict, change, and environmental disasters in the early modern city. Moreover, she is fascinated by the interactions between power, archiving and history writing.
