Introduction

This project takes on two fundamental historical questions: How have ordinary men and women shaped politics before they had the right to vote? And how have power relations shaped archives, determining whose histories have been written, and whose have been silenced? It does so by focusing on food protests in Dutch, Italian, and Ottoman cities between 1550 and 1750.

Premodern protest have long been regarded as having paved the way toward political equality. For the early modern period, food protests were arguably the most pervasive, yet they are largely absent from this narrative. Often led by women, they have been assumed to be motivated by hunger rather than politics. The Daily Bread project argues that this interpretation partly stems from archival silencing: contemporary authorities disregarded women as political actors, also in the production of archival sources. In turn, later historians, relying on these sources, mainly interpreted the involvement of women as an expression of domestic roles.

The Daily Bread project compares early modern food protests across European and Ottoman cities during the period of climate change associated with the Little Ice Age. By doing so, it seeks to uncover the power relations at play not only in the streets, but also in the archive and in the writing of history itself.

Funding & partners

The Daily Bread project is funded by a VICI grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and supported by the UvA’s Faculty of Humanities and the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (KNIR).