I. Cataloguing, digitizing, and researching the archives of stained glass workshop Nicolas & Sons

The stained glass workshop F. Nicolas and Sons has been in business in Roermond from 1855 to 1968. It was the biggest and most important workshop in the Netherlands, and produced stained glass and lead lights for thousands of churches and secular buildings all over the world. The archive is an important primary source for the history of craftsmanship, art history, history of religion, and entrepreneurial history. The Centre for the Social History of Limburg (SHCL) is now cataloguing, conserving and digitizing the company’s designs and records.

The archive of F. Nicolas and Sons requires innovative conservation measures. The collection is hard to handle, nearly impossible to consult and is therefore at this moment not accessible for research or valorization. The main reason is the big collection of cartoons in the archive. Cartoons are life-size working drawings used in the production process of a stained glass window, sometimes more than two meters wide and eight meters tall. The archive contains about 9.000 of these cartoons, besides smaller drawings, photographs and the company records. The goal of this project is to provide easy access to the sources for researchers.
Thanks to generous funding from Metamorfoze, the Royal Library’s conservation project, and funding from other parties to a total amount of € 450.000, SHCL is able to fully conserve and digitize 10 percent of all cartoons, as well as a major part of the records. The project runs for two years. In this period every roll of cartoons will be opened and catalogued. Conservation and scanning will be executed by external companies, specialized in paper conservation and scanning oversized objects.

Part of the project will also be PhD research on the history of the firm, its clientele and the art works it produced.
The project leader is SHCL-archivist Dirk van de Leemput.

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II. Special Issue International Review of Social History 23: ‘Migration and Ethnicity in Coalfield History: Global Perspectives’.

From the nineteenth century the development of industrial and transport technologies required the supply of coal-based energy in every part of the world. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century globalization, including colonialism, would not have been possible without coal. Coalmining operations were launched in all world regions, and to enable exploitation mine operators had to find, mobilize, and direct workers to the mining sites. This quest for labour triggered a series of migration processes, and resulted in a broad array of labour relations (both free and unfree). Efforts to find new workers for the mines often resulted in the recruitment of ethnic groups of a lower social status, not only because they were rural and unskilled, but also because they were considered inferior from a cultural or ethnic viewpoint. The contributions in this Special Issue cover cases from Africa (Nigeria, Zimbabwe), Asia (China, Japan), the Americas (USA, Brazil), Turkey, the Soviet Union, and western Europe (France, Germany), and a broad range of topics, from segregation, forced labour, and subcontracting to labour struggles, discrimination, ethnic paternalism, and sport.

The Special Issue by Ad knotter and David Mayer (eds). collects papers discussed at a workshop organized by the Centre for the Social History of Limburg (SHCL) in November 2014 at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) in Wassenaar. It was published in 2015 by Cambridge University Press.

The workshop was supported financially by the NIAS and by the N.W. Posthumus Institute, Nederlandsch Economisch Historisch Archief, the Limburg University Fund Maastricht, and the Research Stimulation Fund of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University.