The PhD researcher will work within the ERC-funded project United We Stand. The Dynamics and Consequences of Institutions for Collective Action in Pre-Industrial Europe' which examines the connection between institutions for collective action, marriage patterns and economic development in detail. The project is funded by the European Research Council, as part of a Starting Grant awarded to project-co-ordinator Dr. Tine De Moor.
The PhD researcher involved in this subproject will concentrate on the functioning of institutions for collective action and their interaction with exogenous change such as population growth, agricultural change, market integration, political pressure etc.
The PhD researcher will study a number of case-studies of rural institutions for collective action, such as commons, irrigation communities and rural guilds in order to compare systematically how these institutions dealt with exogenous shocks and continuous change in the above mentioned fields.
Moreover, the research will focus on how these institutions for collective action managed to deal with internal changes such as changes in the group size, in the social-economic background of their members, in the participation level of their members etc. The selection of cases and their geographical location will also depend on the background of the selected candidate. This study will be conducted in close cooperation with other members of the team, both in Utrecht and elsewhere in Europe.
The PhD researcher will be based at Utrecht University, and be part of the research team led by Dr. Tine De Moor and will as such also be part of the department of social and economic history led by prof. Bas van Bavel and Jan Luiten van Zanden.
PhD Researcher: Social and Economic History
