Premodern protest movements have been regarded as having paved the way towards political equality. Yet food protests, integral to the early modern period, are missing from this narrative. These protests—often led by women— are assumed to be motivated by hunger, not politics. My hypothesis is that this is due to archival silencing: contemporary authorities disregardedwomen as political actors, also in the production of archival sources; in turn, later historians mainly interpreted their involvement as an expression of their domestic role.

The project will compare food protests between 1500-1800, when climate change caused by the Little Ice Age affected European and Ottoman cities. It will trace the impact of food protests in Dutch, Italian, and Ottoman cities, each with distinct administrative, social, and archival cultures and set in differing environmental contexts. This long-term, comparative perspective will radically revise the dominant narrative of early modern political development.

In its methodology, the project merges social history’s attention for the politically “disenfranchised” with cultural history’s sensitivity to the impact of power on archives and history-writing. It also draws on insights from environmental and comparative urban history. Ultimately, the project aims to uncover the power relations at play in the streets, in the archive, and in the production of history.