Esther BeeckaertGhent University | UGhent · Department of History
Esther Beeckaert
About
14
Publications
1,221
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11
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Esther Beeckaert (1994) studied history at Ghent University and graduated in 2016 with a MA dissertation on the crisis of the 1840’s. Between 2016 and 2022 she worked as a doctoral researcher on a FWO research project at Ghent University and Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Her PhD addressed the commons and rural transformation in the Belgium Ardennes, 1750-1850. It tells a story of how the commons structured social relations, fixed inequalities and became instruments of commercialization.
Publications
Publications (14)
Common land rights are nowadays identified as a pivotal action terrain for building sustainable development and climate resilience. This often leads to an idealisation of these common land systems and the people that manage them. This article presents a research strategy that elaborates on the notion of frontiers to unpack peasant resilience and co...
Lokale overheden en publieke instellingen in Vlaanderen verkopen in
sneltempo hun landbouwgronden. Een lastige budgettaire context
dwingt hen naar eigen zeggen tot verkoop om talrijke andere
beleidsdoelstellingen, waaronder sociale huisvesting, te kunnen
financieren. Die eenzijdige focus op de marktwaarde verdringt een
zeer noodzakelijk debat over...
This article examines the impact of the commons on economic inequality in the eighteenth-century rural society of the Ardennes in the Duchy of Luxembourg. A unique set of cadastral sources provides an opportunity to quantify the distribution of the income derived from the commons on the level of households. More precisely, we ask if and how the dis...
This article questions changes in the funding of local poor relief during the 1845-1848 food crisis in Flemish village communities. This will be studied comparativelybetween three distinct regions in Flanders: inner-Flanders, coastal Flanders, and theWaasland. In all three regions it was local relief institutions that increased their financialcapac...
As a group of young historians we are strongly convinced that the future of social and economic history will be a collective endeavour that crosses institutional and disciplinary boundaries. Only by means of continuous and intensive interaction (junior) researchers will be able to bring the societal turn to a decisive phase in the next ten years. T...
Juni 1845. In de regio rond Kortrijk duiken de eerste sporen van Phytophthora infestans op. Tot dan toe was de uit de Andes afkomstige ziekte ongekend op het Europese continent. Op enkele maanden tijd werden grote delen van Noordwest-Europa besmet, wat tijdens de periode 1845-1850 leidde tot de 'laatste' Europese hongersnood met de Ierse Great Fami...
Projects
Project (1)
This research project aims to reassess historiographical debates on shifting power relations in rural communities during the transition period 1750-1900, when village communities were gradually incorporated into modern society in Western Europe. The ambition of this project is to approach these shifts by analysing social property relations, which appear at the heart of power struggles between and among local actors, regional parties and state representatives. Currently, historians all too often restrict their focus to the existence of private and secure property rights, which is an insufficient and all too narrow approach to the problem. The innovation of this proposal is to perform in-depth socio-historical research of broad and complex bundles of use rights, as opposed to a one-sided design. The Ardennes, located in the very south of present-day Belgium offer an excellent case study to realize these ambitions, since a unique combination of small peasant ownership and various sets of common use rights survived throughout the period of ruraltransformation. As such, the research project will zoom in on the changing (1) formal regulations, (2) actual distribution of land rights and (3) underlying social practices of negotiation and conflict. Ultimately, this three pronged research design will be implemented by placing in-depth sourcebased and long-term analysis of the Ardennes in a comparative interregional perspective within Western-Europe.
