PhD candidate "The Rise and Decline of Patrimonial Capitalism in The Netherlands, 1780-1920" (1.0 FTE)

The Department of History and Art History seeks to appoint a PhD students for the project “Investment behaviour, political change and economic growth in the Netherlands, 1780-1920”, funded by means of an NWO Free Competition grant awarded to Prof. Dr. Oscar Gelderblom,

The PhD candidate will be working on the following project: "The Rise and Decline of Patrimonial Capitalism in The Netherlands, 1780-1920". The position may include a 0,1-0,2 FTE teaching load.

This PhD project maps the size and composition of the Dutch political elite’s portfolios over time. Using data from probate inventories and data on asset returns garnered from family archives, the candidate will construct a model investment portfolio for 20-year periods from 1780 to 1920 to serve as a gauge for individual investor behaviour at these various moments in time. She/he will then exploit the automated linkage with biographical data to link investment choices with personal characteristics, including family ties, residence, profession, and the nature of the political activities carried out throughout their lives. As a third step, the PhD candidate will complement data from existing studies on Dutch national wealth with additional research in the Memories to benchmark the political elite’s investment against that of the top 0.1 per cent of the wealth distribution.