CfP Jaarcongres 2020 (deadline verlengd tot 15 mei)

Conference date: October 15, 2020
Location: Amsterdam
Submission deadline: May 15, 2020

2020 marks the 300-year anniversary of the 1720 South Sea Bubble, a turning point in the history of finance. Starting in France, England and the Low Countries, the bubbles left their mark on Europe and beyond. They also sparked a wide public debate on the value and dangers of speculation. Far more than a financial incident, the bubbles prompted all kinds of cultural anxiety. The many pamphlets, plays and prints, some of which were collected in The Great Mirror of Folly, attest to this and served not only to ridicule, but also to make sense of finance.

This conference seeks to make sense of the cultural and social understanding and impact of finance in the long eighteenth century. It takes 1720 as a watershed moment, but also welcomes challenges to a historiographical trend that treats the Bubbles as a rupture in the development of early modern finance while overlooking continuities and longer-term trends.

This conference challenges scholars of the long-eighteenth century to step forward and make fresh engagement with financial history and related public debates. We invite scholars from backgrounds such as cultural history, art history, literary studies and the history of knowledge and science to investigate the different ways in which the world of finance was entwined with different systems of knowledge, and how financial practices shaped, and were shaped by, society and culture as a whole. As explained below, this conference will be followed by a one-day conference with policy makers and banking professionals. Therefore we specifically encourage papers that explore broader implications of their findings both for the more traditional financial history and for our understanding of finance today.

Topics include, but are not limited to:
 Cultural responses to finance and speculation in the long 18thcentury.
 The global and colonial dimension of European financialisation.
 Understanding the material culture and physical heritage of finance
 Representations of finance and financiers and their practices.
 Critical analyses or historicization of concepts used in finance, such as bubbles, investment, speculation and interest.
 How the ‘science’ of finance was embedded in and shaped by other knowledge domains.

We welcome submissions for individual papers (20 minutes). Paper proposals should include a title, a 300-word summary, and a 50-word biographical blurb. Proposals may only be submitted in English. The final deadline for all submissions is March 31, 2020. Speakers will be informed about their participation by April 14.

Please send your proposal to: historyoffinance@gmail.com

The conference will be preceded by a performance of stock-jobbing play of 1720, and followed by a one-day public event in which historians discuss the current urgency of making sense of finance with the financial sector, policy makers and other experts. More information about these events will be posted on: https://history-of-finance.org.

Winnaar Scriptieprijs 2018-2019 bekend!

De jury, bestaande uit Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis, Karen Hollewand en Christophe Madelein, heeft besloten Tim van Polanen uit te roepen tot laureaat van de Scriptieprijs 2019 voor zijn eindverhandeling ‘Hermanus Noordkerk (1702-1771): een onderzoek naar de beroemdste Amsterdamse advocaat in de achttiende eeuw’ (Universiteit Leiden, master geschiedenis, begeleider: Prof. dr. Judith Pollmann). De jury roemt de originaliteit van het onderwerp en de vraagstelling over advocatuur in de 18^de eeuw alsook de excellente uitwerking van de onderzoeksvragen. De studie is zowel analytisch als historisch breed en combineert historische vaardigheden met juridisch-inhoudelijke kennis van zaken. Het is een gedegen onderzoek waarbij de kritische omgang met zowel primaire als secundaire bronnen opvalt. Tim van Polanen slaagt erin een eigen positie in te nemen.

CfP: ‘Dealing with disasters’ (deadline 1 juni 2020)

Nowadays, we are constantly confronted with frantic reports on natural calamities. Major news outlets describe the potentially cataclysmic effects of the latest forest fires, floods, and storms – and due to the ongoing climate crisis, extreme weather events can be expected to have ever greater impacts on our lives. If we are left wondering how we should deal with these disasters, we should also acknowledge that natural calamities have always occurred and have affected human experience in myriad ways.
For many centuries, news about catastrophic events has been disseminated via media such as pamphlets, chronicles, poems, and prints. This conference seeks to address the cultural representations that reflected and shaped the ways in which people learned and thought about disasters that occurred either nearby or far away, both in time and space.

Thijssen-Schoute MA scriptieprijs 2020

The Dr. C. Louise Thijssen-Schoute Foundation is soliciting nominations for the 2020 award for the best MA-thesis on early modern Dutch intellectual history. Established in 1961, Louise Thijssen-Schoute Foundation aims to encourage research in the history of ideas of the early modern Netherlands. According to the will of Dr. Thijssen-Schoute – the author of an influential work on Dutch Cartesianism – financial support could be given to projects and publications conferences devoted to the emergence and dissemination of new philosophical ideas, as well as the intersections of literature and science in the seventeenth- and early eighteenth century. Moreover, the Foundation recently has established special chairs at VU University Amsterdam and the Radboud University Nijmegen.

Call for Papers Jaarcongres Werkgroep 18e Eeuw “Making sense of finance” (deadline 31 maart)

Conference date: October 15, 2020
Location: Amsterdam
Submission deadline: March 31, 2020

2020 marks the 300-year anniversary of the 1720 South Sea Bubble, a turning point in the history of finance. Starting in France, England and the Low Countries, the bubbles left their mark on Europe and beyond. They also sparked a wide public debate on the value and dangers of speculation. Far more than a financial incident, the bubbles prompted all kinds of cultural anxiety. The many pamphlets, plays and prints, some of which were collected in The Great Mirror of Folly, attest to this and served not only to ridicule, but also to make sense of finance.

Lees nu het nieuwste nummer van EMLC

Het nieuwste nummer van het multidisciplinaire Open Access tijdschrift Early Modern Low Countries (EMLC) staat nu online met als thema ‘Knowledge Production in Natural History between Southeast Asia and the Low Countries’.

CfP: ‘Exploring interdisciplinary approaches to songs and practices of singing (1200-today)’ (deadline 20 dec.)

THALIA en het Amsterdam Centre for Cross-Disciplinary Emotion and Sensory Studies nodigen onderzoekers uit om deel te nemen aan het congres ‘Exploring interdisciplinary approaches to songs and practices of singing (1200-today)’ dat op 1-3 maart 2020 te Ghent zal plaatsvinden. Onderstaand de Call for Papers:

CfP: ISECS Seminar for Early Career Scholars (deadline 10 januari)

ISECS (International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies) nodigt jonge wetenschappers uit om deel te nemen aan hun Seminar for Early Career Eighteenth-Century Scholars dat zal plaatsvinden op 25-29 Mei 2010 in Lausanne. Het thema van dit jaar is: ‘Memory and (Un)remembrance’.

Jaarboek De Achttiende Eeuw

Afgelopen week is het Jaarboek bij onze leden op de mat gevallen – hopelijk bent u met veel plezier begonnen met lezen. Het Jaarboek staat dit jaar in het teken van de driehonderd jaar geleden verschenen Daniel Defoes Robinson Crusoe (1719). In dit reisverhaal beschrijft een ‘verlichte’ schipbreukeling hoe hij zich weet te redden op een onbewoond Caribisch eiland en, na enkele jaren, wordt bijgestaan door de als vanzelfsprekend onderdanige ‘edele wilde’ Vrijdag. Ter ere van deze verjaardag wijdt het Jaarboek De Achttiende Eeuw ​een themadossier aan de niet aflatende productie van edities, vertalingen en bewerkingen van deze roman. Het dossier staat onder redactie van Peter Altena en bevat bijdragen van Carl Niekerk, Rick Honings, Lotte Jensen en Thomas Pierrart. Naast het dossier bevat het Jaarboek afzonderlijke bijdragen over het ontbreken van een auteursportret van Elizabeth Wolff (Lieke van Deinsen) buitenlandse bezoekers van de stadhouderlijke menagerie op Het Grote Loo bij Den Haag (Thomas von der Dunk), trouweloosheid en loyaliteit bij de patriotten (Wijnand Mijnhardt) en  de receptie van Voltaire in de Republiek (Kees van Strien).

Geen lid en toch benieuwd? Als u deze maand nog lid wordt (tegen een gereduceerd tarief van €25 i.p.v. €35 / studenten €10), ontvangt u het Jaarboek van 2019!

CfP: Free speech, religion and political culture in northern Europe, 1400-1750 (deadline: 6 dec.)

Op 16-17 April 2020 zal te Edinburgh het congres ‘Free speech, religion and political culture in northern Europe, 1400-1750’ plaatvinden. Uit de Call for Papers:

This workshop explores aspects of ‘freedom of speech’ in late medieval and early modern northern Europe.  Freedom of speech was by no means a fundamental right in the late middle ages and early modern period, and yet expressions of critical opinions towards power were always possible and often widespread.  They could be uttered verbally, through the spoken or written word, but also through other sign systems and media, ranging from the sound of musical instruments to heraldic languages.