A history of Southeast Asia

Henk Schulte Nordholt wrote a book on the history of Southeast Asia for the new World History Series published by Fischer Verlag (Neue Fischer Weltgeschichte). The book offers an overview of the main developments in the field of politics, economy, religion and culture. The book was published in German and appeared in 2017.

Dutch Atlantic Connections: The Circulation of People, Goods and Ideas in the Atlantic World, 1680-1800

This project analyzes how the Dutch networks functioned in the Atlantic world system and to explain to what extent and why these networks changed during this period. The analysis relates to the circulation of people and goods as well as to that of ideas. The project has not only generated more insight into the relevance of the Atlantic dimension to Dutch history, but also contributes to the rapidly expanding international field of ‘Atlantic history’ at large.

Elite Network Shifts

This project uses cutting edge computational techniques to automatically extract and visualise Indonesian political elite networks from over a million digitised newspaper articles. Initially conceived to trace patterns of elite networks over periods of regime transition in Indonesia, it asks: How sociologically meaningful are these computational networks and how do they compare to traditional analyses of regime change? What other interesting sociological questions are amenable to the same set of techniques?

In Search of Middle Indonesia

The Dutch-Indonesian research program ‘In search of Middle Indonesia’ is a wide-ranging attempt to relocate the focus of the social science research agenda on Indonesia, away from the ‘commanding heights’ of society, the state and the economy, to the underestimated middle reaches.

JARAK: The Commoditization of an Alternative Biofuel Crop in Indonesia

JARAK is the short version of the title of the research program “JARAK: The Commoditization of an Alternative Biofuel Crop in Indonesia.” JARAK is the acronym for the “Jatropha Research and Knowledge Network”, and is also the Indonesian word for Jatropha curcas, the plant that is central to this research program. The program is funded by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences (KNAW) and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), as part of the overall program “Agriculture beyond Food”.