dr. P (Pim) de Zwart

I am an Associate Professor of Economic and Environmental History at Wageningen University. I studied history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the London School of Economics, Harvard University and Utrecht University. I received my MA from Utrecht University in 2010 (cum laude) and my PhD in 2015 (cum laude). My thesis won the Economic History Society’s Thirsk-Feinstein Prize for Best Dissertation in Economic and Social History in 2016. With Jan Luiten van Zanden, I wrote a textbook on the rise of world trade and its implications for economic and social development across the globe between 1500 and 1800 (The Origins of Globalization, Cambridge University Press, 2018). 

My research deals with the consequences of international trade and the imposition of colonial institutions for well-being, the distribution of income and the environment in South and Southeast Asia since ca. 1800. In 2017 I was awarded a NWO Veni grant for a research project entitled “Unfair Trade? Globalization, Institutions and Inequality in Southeast Asia, 1830-1940” (2018-2022) in which I examined the inequality effects of trade in Southeast Asia in the age of high imperialism. I now lead the NWO Vidi project “Tragedy of the Tropics: Colonialism, Commons and Commodities in Southeast Asian Deforestation since1850” (2025-2030), in which Angelo Galindo, Dea Iftina and me investigate long-run trends in, and causes of, deforestation in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.

I am Research Affiliate of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and Research Coordinator of the Economic and Environmental History Group in Wageningen. Since 2018 I am a member of the editorial committee of the International Review of Social History. I am also an elected member of the Wageningen Young Academy.

Previously, I was co-director of the research programme “Globalization, Inequality and Sustainability in Historical Perspective” of the N.W. Posthumus research school for economic and social history (2018-2024) and I was Research Coordinator of Wageningen University’s Economics Section (ca. 150 staff) (2022-2024). 

My website: pimdezwart.com