Rural and Environmental History Group

About us

We offer various courses in history to students of Wageningen University & Research. Our research program is situated at the crossroads of rural, environmental, social, economic and global history.

Our mission is to offer temporal depth to societal debates and social theories on sustainable and equitable welfare development. We apply comparative historical methods to better understand long-term patterns of interdependence between people, institutions and environments. Our empirical work builds on a combination of qualitative sources and large statistical datasets, which we construct from historical archives across the globe. Our current research projects are situated in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America (c. 1500-2000).