NISE-Lecture 2025
Poor Flanders: a World History

This year's NISE-Lecture will be given by Prof.Dr. Maarten Van Ginderachter following his recent publication Arm Vlaanderen. Een wereldgeschiedenis – Honger, ziekte en globalisering in het midden van de 19de eeuw

NISE-Lecture 2025

In 1850, Flanders is poor. Very poor. Unimaginably poor. Hunger is rife. Potatoes rot in the fields. Cholera and typhoid decimate the population. The linen industry, the last lifeline for many paupers, collapses. People succumb to exhaustion, dropping dead in the streets while groups of starving beggars roam those same streets. Out of sheer misery, the people eat tree bark and grass. This was the last Belgian famine in peacetime. We shudder at so much misery from a distant past. Yet this time is closer to us than we think. This is when our modern, globalised world was born.

This book tells the story of the crisis years around 1850 as you have never read it before. The history of ‘Poor Flanders’ is not only a tale of local tragedy of unprecedented crop failures and the decline of the most Flemish of Flemish cottage industries, the linen industry. It is also a global story of infectious diseases crossing continents and oceans, of a potato blight arriving from America, of Peruvian bird droppings and Senegalese gum trending in Europe, and of unprecedented imports from the Wild West and the Far East. In short, this is world history par excellence."

Bio

Maarten Van Ginderachter is full professor of History ('gewoon hoogleraar') at the Department of History at Antwerp University, where he teaches world history and contemporary history. He was the former chair of the research group Power in History - the Centre for political history, and served for ten years as Program (vice-)Director of graduate and undergraduate studies of the History Department between 2013 and 2022.

His research is mainly focused on the history of nations and nationalism in Belgium and Europe. He has written and co-edited several books and themed journal issues on the subject and also contributed to leading international journals such as Nations and nationalism, Social history, the International review of social history, the History workshop journal and National Identities.

Practicalities

The yearly NISE-Lecture will take place on 19 November at 19hr in the Nottebohm-room of the Heritage Library Hendrik Conscience in Antwerp. The lecture will be given in Dutch. To register, please send an email to publiekswerking@advn.be