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Publications (83)
The volume focuses on the importance and placement of alternative exchange practices in the 13th to 18th centuries, specifically examining goods and services used as means of payment in barter or in-kind transactions. Despite monetary theory emphasizing credit and real currency, coins or paper money did not prevent in-kind transactions. Barter isn’...
This article provides the first comprehensive overview of the severity and impact of the Spanish flu in Belgium (1918-1919) and thereby makes a long overdue connection with the extensive international literature on pandemics in general and Spanish flu in particular. Leveraging ego documents (diaries), municipal-level excess mortality, and individua...
Disasters and History offers the first comprehensive historical overview of hazards and disasters. Drawing on a range of case studies, including the Black Death, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the Fukushima disaster, the authors examine how societies dealt with shocks and hazards and their potentially disastrous outcomes. They reveal the ways in...
Global change amplifies coastal flood risks and motivates a paradigm shift towards nature-based coastal defence, where engineered structures are supplemented with coastal wetlands such as saltmarshes. Although experiments and models indicate that such natural defences can attenuate storm waves, there is still limited field evidence on how much they...
Disasters and History offers the first comprehensive historical overview of hazards and disasters. Drawing on a range of case studies, including the Black Death, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the Fukushima disaster, the authors examine how societies dealt with shocks and hazards and their potentially disastrous outcomes. They reveal the ways in...
Disasters and History offers the first comprehensive historical overview of hazards and disasters. Drawing on a range of case studies, including the Black Death, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the Fukushima disaster, the authors examine how societies dealt with shocks and hazards and their potentially disastrous outcomes. They reveal the ways in...
Disasters and History offers the first comprehensive historical overview of hazards and disasters. Drawing on a range of case studies, including the Black Death, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the Fukushima disaster, the authors examine how societies dealt with shocks and hazards and their potentially disastrous outcomes. They reveal the ways in...
Disasters and History offers the first comprehensive historical overview of hazards and disasters. Drawing on a range of case studies, including the Black Death, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the Fukushima disaster, the authors examine how societies dealt with shocks and hazards and their potentially disastrous outcomes. They reveal the ways in...
Disasters and History offers the first comprehensive historical overview of hazards and disasters. Drawing on a range of case studies, including the Black Death, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the Fukushima disaster, the authors examine how societies dealt with shocks and hazards and their potentially disastrous outcomes. They reveal the ways in...
Disasters and History offers the first comprehensive historical overview of hazards and disasters. Drawing on a range of case studies, including the Black Death, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the Fukushima disaster, the authors examine how societies dealt with shocks and hazards and their potentially disastrous outcomes. They reveal the ways in...
Disasters and History offers the first comprehensive historical overview of hazards and disasters. Drawing on a range of case studies, including the Black Death, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the Fukushima disaster, the authors examine how societies dealt with shocks and hazards and their potentially disastrous outcomes. They reveal the ways in...
While resilience only became a pervasive concept in disaster studies shortly before and after 2000, its potential to understand natural hazards and disasters, and improve the capacity of societies to deal with such hazards and disasters, was already explored at a much earlier stage. In fact, shortly after the pioneering publications of Holling on ‘...
Natural disasters nearly always catch societies by surprise, even though in hindsight historians invariably conclude that being caught off-guard in this way was in fact unfounded as both the existence of the natural hazard which caused the disaster, and the societal conditions making communities vulnerable to the hazard, were clearly present before...
Aan de basis van het actuele klimaatvraagstuk ligt een fundamen-tele onrechtvaardigheid: die groepen die het meest kwetsbaar zijn voor de gevolgen van klimaatverandering, hebben doorgaans de kleinste ecologische voetafdruk (en vice versa). Is deze ecologi-sche onrechtvaardigheid onvermijdelijk of het gevolg van maat-schappelijke en politieke keuzes...
Recent advances in paleoclimatology and the growing digital availability of large historical datasets on human activity have created new opportunities to investigate long‐term interactions between climate and society. However, noncritical use of historical datasets can create pitfalls, resulting in misleading findings that may become entrenched as...
For more than a thousand years, the building of seawalls has been the dominant strategy to cope with flood risk in the coastal wetlands of the North Sea area. In debates on coastal adaptation, the seawall has become a symbol of "hard" infrastructure contrasting with "soft" engineering and "building-with-nature" technologies. Inspired by both enviro...
To adequately respond to crises, adaptive governance is crucial, but sometimes institutional adaptation is constrained, even when a society is faced with acute hazards. We hypothesize that economic inequality, defined as unequal ownership of wealth and access to resources, crucially interacts with the way institutions function and are adapted or no...
Murder in the Wadden Sea. The 1717 Christmas Flood and vulnerability to storm surges
On Christmas Eve 1717 the Wadden Sea was hit by the most deadly storm surge in the history of the North Sea area, claiming between 11,000 and 14,000 victims. In 1570, 1634, and 1686 the same region had also suffered exceptionally high numbers of casualties during s...
On Christmas Day 1717 the North Sea area was hit by the most deadly flood disaster in its entire history, which took the life of more than 10,000 people. Present-day concerns over climate change and the recurrence of extreme weather conditions might tempt historians to discuss floods like 1717 in terms of the overall vulnerability and resilience of...
Beoordeel een streek niet naar haar bodem. Ook op arme en
zandige bodems is landbouw mogelijk. Bewijs hiervan zijn de
verschillende ‘aardverschuivingen’ die plaatsgevonden
hebben in de geschiedenis van de Kempen. Terwijl premoderne
Kempense boeren kozen voor een gemengde, collectieve
landbouw op de vruchtbaarste stukken land, zoekt de landbouwer
va...
Food crises in the premodern period are often explained by focusing on weather- or climate- related harvest failures (Food Availability Decline) or market disturbances provoking a declining access to food for some groups in society (Food Entitlement Decline). However, the FAD versus FED –debate does not fully acknowledge the underlying mechanisms w...
Food crises in the premodern period are often explained by focusing on weather-or climate-related harvest failures (Food Availability Decline) or market disturbances provoking a declining access to food for some groups in society (Food Entitlement Decline). However, the FAD versus FED -debate does not fully acknowledge the underlying mechanisms whi...
Cet ouvrage rassemble des études centrées sur l'histoire agraire et économique du Moyen Âge, avec une focalisation particulière sur les stratégies et la culture matérielle des familles paysannes. Elles sont dédiées à Jean-Pierre Devroey, un des spécialistes mondiaux de l'histoire agraire du Haut Moyen Âge. Professeur à l'Université Libre de Bruxell...
Since the turn of the Millennium, major changes in economic history practice such as the dominance of econometrics and the championing of 'big data', as well as changes in how research is funded, have created new pressures for medieval economic historians to confront. In this article, it is suggested that one way of strengthening the field further...
This paper describes the landscape evolution of the Waasland Scheldt polders in the north of Belgium from the Late Glacial – early Holocene to the present time, and the effects of this changing landscape on the human settlement. The regional landscape evolution has been visualised in a series of palaeogeographical maps for successive time frames. T...
This is the first volume of a brand new journal in the field of environmental history. Despite the huge importance of environmental topics in current societal discussions, international relations, politics and sciences, the number of academic journals dealing with the “interrelated” evolution of society and nature throughout history is still very l...
Intertidal flats and marshes provide important ecosystem services to coastal and estuarine societies, and have therefore been subject to extensive research. Most of these studies, however, have one thing in common: intertidal landscape response has been studied from a rather short-term perspective, mostly less than 100 years. Furthermore, the impac...
Coastal marshlands are landscapes of risk: risk-taking is central to capitalist farming. The two seem to merge in the large-scale drainage projects of coastal and inland marshlands that proliferated all over Europe during the early modern period. Drainage projects mobilized huge amounts of mainly non-agricultural capital but also relied on advanced...
Historical maps are vital tools for landscape reconstruction from the late medieval period onwards. However, the planimetric accuracy of local and regional maps before the nineteenth century is often considered problematic. This paper proposes a method for the evaluation of these maps, through integration in multiple computer programs such as ArcGI...
The acceptance of mapmaking in medieval and early modern Europe was neither a uniform nor a linear process. Comparing two neighbouring regions in the Low Countries, we explain the varying appetite for maps and mapmaking first by unravelling how people dealt with space before the introduction of modern mapmaking and, second, by identifying the actor...
Starting in the later Middle Ages, the coastal wetlands along the southern North Sea area were increasingly hit by a series of catastrophic storm surges. Deeply rooted in the collective memory of coastal society, these flood disasters are mostly discussed as products of meteorological disturbances, environmental vulnerability or technological failu...
Urbanity was a distinguishing feature of the medieval Low Countries, but even in its most urbanised core a majority of the population continued to live outside the city walls. In his new and encompassing synthesis of the history of the Low Countries in the later Middle Ages, Wim Blockmans emphasises the fundamental intertwining of urban and rural s...
From the High Middle Ages on, the coastal wetlands of the North Sea area have been intensively reclaimed and settled. In order to enable intensive agricultural production in these areas, a complex drainage and flood control system was gradually installed, one that demanded a permanent investment of huge amounts of capital and labour. As the mainten...
Manors and markets, Bas van Bavel's provocative new synthesis of the social and economic history of the medieval Low Countries, offers a strong case for the existence of socio-institutional path dependency. In order to explain the remarkable regional diversity in economic development within the Low Countries, Van Bavel retraces the area's divergent...
Although the importance of peat as energy supplier in the medieval and early modern North Sea Area is well known, the location,
extent and nature of the peat-producing areas—peat marshes or mires—remains amongst the major problems in the landscape history
of the coastal wetlands. This is especially true for areas like Northern Flanders, where peat...
The world is full of environmental injustices and inequalities, yet few European historians have tackled these subjects head on; nor have they explored their relationships with social inequalities. In this innovative collection of historical essays the contributors consider a range of past environmental injustices, spanning seven northern and weste...
New, revised edition, 2013.
The Murky Shadow of the Golden Age. Historical-Ecological Reflections about Flooding and Economic Transformation in Ancien Régime RijnlandIn the past as well as today, flooding and other water-related problems cannot be explained by isolating the physical dynamics of the landscape or the technological and institutional failure of society. In their...
Dike builders or disrupters of the peace? The counts of Flanders and water management in the coastal wetlands (from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries). During the late mediaeval period, water management in the coastal wetlands of the Low Countries was strongly decentralized. It remained untouched by the judicial and administrative policies...
Strolling through the Flemish coastal ‘polders’ at the beginning of the 21st century, visitors capable of mentally eliminating the wall of high-rise blocks along the coastline, the motorways criss-crossing the countryside, and the often chaotic development of residential areas, are still impressed by the emptiness of the land, the wide views, the -...
The management of the coastal water control system in the medieval Low Countries was characterized by a bottom-up organisation, with apparently broadparticipation of all people concemed. The joint effort of rural communities facing the threat of inundation and land-loss, is often considered to have been at the very origin of a long-lasting traditio...
Tim SOENS, Evolution and Management of the Counts of Flanders’ Domain under Louis de Male and Philippe le Hardi (1346-1404)
No late medieval king or prince, eager to acquire an important position on the international political scene, proved able to live from his own domanial resources. In the final quarter of the XIVth century, the counts of Flande...
No late medieval king or prince, eager to acquire an important position on the international political scene, proved able to live from his own domanial resources. In the final quarter of the 14th century, the counts of Flanders too derived substantial funds from subventions, loans, and other "extraordinary" revenues, but this did not imply a progre...
By fhe end of the I3/IJ Ct'1JI1f1:V (/ /l!ell fil1la;oJ/ing m(l{er control ~)ISlfm hnri Ófff} initiat{'d in the Flemüh coastrll p/ajn. Dmm hllt! been buift Ol/ a/I JJJ(~io1" !idal fhaIlJle!s. Large d~remive dikeJ' pro/eclNI tlu' land mld ;o;tilf ncw land lUiiJ gained ~ll erea/ingpo/das a/olJg fhe eJ'tf!tlr;es o.fbotb rhe Zwin IJf({r Brugt!;)· ,lIlt...