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Associate Professor, Economic and Environmental History, Wageningen University (WUR)

Research Coordinator, Economic and Environmental History, Wageningen University (WUR)

Research Affiliate, Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), London

I am an Associate Professor of Economic and Environmental History at Wageningen University. I studied history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the London School of Economics, Harvard University and Utrecht University. I received my MA from Utrecht University in 2010 (cum laude) and my PhD in 2015 (cum laude). In my dissertation I examined the Dutch East India Company’s intercontinental trade and its effects on living standards in Southern Africa and Asia, c. 1600 – c. 1800. My thesis won the Economic History Society’s Thirsk-Feinstein Prize for Best Dissertation in Economic and Social History in 2016. Together with Jan Luiten van Zanden, I wrote a textbook that deals with the rise of world trade and its implications for economic and social development across the globe between 1500 and 1800 (The Origins of Globalization, Cambridge University Press, 2018). 

My research deals with the consequences of international trade and the imposition of colonial institutions for well-being, the distribution of income and the environment in South and Southeast Asia since ca. 1800. In 2017 I was awarded a NWO Veni grant for a research project entitled “Unfair Trade? Globalization, Institutions and Inequality in Southeast Asia, 1830-1940” (2018-2022) in which I examined the inequality effects of trade in Southeast Asia in the age of high imperialism. I am currently PI of the NWO Vidi project “Tragedy of the Tropics: Colonialism, Commons and Commodities in Southeast Asian Deforestation since1850” (2025-2030), in which I together with Angelo Galindo and Dea Iftina investigate long-run trends in, and causes of, deforestation in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.

I am a Research Affiliate of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and I serve as Research Coordinator of the Economic and Environmental History Group in Wageningen. Since 2018 I am a member of the editorial committee of the International Review of Social History. I am also an elected member of the Wageningen Young Academy.

Previously, I acted as co-director of the research programme “Globalization, Inequality and Sustainability in Historical Perspective” of the N.W. Posthumus research school for economic and social history (2018-2024) and I was Research Coordinator of Wageningen University’s Economics Section (ca. 150 staff) (2022-2024). Between 2017 and 2021 I sat on the editorial board of the Research Data Journal in the Humanities and Social Sciences.