32918 research outputs found
Sort by
The peak and demise of the working horse : Britain's transition from equine to motor power, c. 1870-1950
No full textDefence date: 15 July 2022Examining Board: Professor Youssef Cassis, (European University Institute, Supervisor); Professor Alexander Etkind, (European University Institute); Professor David Edgerton, (King's College London); Professor Abigail Woods, University of LincolnThe utility of horsepower did not end with the invention of the coal-powered steam engine in the eighteenth century. The British economy remained horse-drawn until the 1950s. Drawing on archival research in the UK, the thesis contributes to an understanding of the material basis of the economy through a history of consumption. This thesis frames human reliance on horsepower following Erich Zimmermann’s functional resource theory, whereby resources acquire or lose (social) value depending on social, cultural, political, or technological change. Resources in this sense are not fixed, but open-ended and reversible. Thus, horsepower is made in the way society perceives, experiences, and knows this animal resource. The thesis starts by discussing the varying uses of horsepower in the British economy and its eventual demise. It shows how producers and users of horsepower both influenced and were affected by the horse’s disappearance. Moreover, the thesis highlights the role of institutional actors in this process. It eventually studies the decision of businesses to replace horsepower with fossil fuel powered technology and the impact that had on those working closely with the horse. Furthermore, the thesis pays attention to the external factors that unmade horsepower, such as the role of globalisation, social structures, users’ preferences, or shocks. The study considers the lessons from previous energy transitions, the reasons for the longevity of horsepower, and its (dis-) use. It argues firstly that shifts in energy usage take a long time. Secondly, this process needs to be situated its regional, national, and global context, and thirdly, requires a high degree of political and entrepreneurial imagination and willingness to take risks. Lastly, shifts and dynamics in the cultural perception of horsepower in society determine its use
Europeanisation à la carte : negotiating Spanish accession to the European community, 1979-1985
No full textDefence date: 26 March 2022Examining Board : Professor Federico Romero, (European University Institute); Professor Glenda Sluga, (European University Institute); Professor Fernando Guirao, (Pompeu Fabra University); Professor N. Piers Ludlow, (London School of Economics and Political Science)This thesis investigates the negotiations over Spanish accession to the European Community, which ran from 1979 to 1985. It focuses on the economic dimension of membership negotiations and explores three economic sectors (industry, fisheries, and agriculture). By adopting this approach, this thesis aims to go beyond purely political perspectives which have predominated in the literature. In doing so, this doctoral dissertation challenges traditional accounts of how Spain joined the EC. These accounts focus on the political meaning of the enlargement toward a newly established democratic country and the diplomatic disputes over the intra-Community agro-budgetary issues, which are traditionally portrayed as the main reason behind delays in achieving the overall political objective of securing the Spanish democracy through the EC membership. Instead, this thesis shows a much more complex account in which both parties struggled to Europeanise Spain according to their material interests, and often contrary to the public discourses coming from the main actors at the time. The Community made efforts to force Spain to open its highly protected industrial market, to discipline the large and disobedient Spanish fishing fleet, and to postpone Spanish incorporation into the Common Agricultural Policy and Common Fisheries Policy. At the same time, Spanish governments were reluctant to Europeanise Spain’s economy by prioritising short-term benefits of maintaining the status quo over taking painful but necessary measures. Finally, this thesis sheds new light on the Community-Spain relations during the first half of the 1980s, the role of Spain within the EC’s southern enlargement, and the way that Spain transitioned from an authoritarian regime with a protected domestic economy to a democratic system with an economic structure comparable to other Western European states
Reflective choices : a liberal theory of consumer law
No full textDefence date: 26 October 2022Examining Board: Prof. Hans-Wolfgang Micklitz (European University Institute, Supervisor); Prof. Martijn Hesselink (European University Institute); Prof. Hanoch Dagan (Tel Aviv University); Prof. Chantal Mak (University of Amsterdam)This thesis argues that the main objective of consumer law is to facilitate consumers’ reflective choices. In order to be reflective, that is autonomy-enhancing, consumers’ choices must meet two conditions. First, they must be accurate, that is consistent with consumers’ preferences. Second, consumers must be able to endorse them after consideration. To this end, consumers should be provided with an opportunity to reflect on their choices and the underlying preferences thereof. Both of these conditions can be compromised in consumer markets, where traders can not only induce consumers to make inaccurate choices, but also have significant power over consumers’ preference-formation. Those circumstances can render consumers’ choices subordinate to traders’ profit-seeking and deprive such choices of their intrinsic, autonomy-enhancing value. Using this framework, the thesis provides an account of European consumer law that is both normatively compelling and descriptively accurate. It interprets the most relevant instruments of the EU consumer acquis – disclosure duties, standard form contracts control, remedies for non-conformity and withdrawal rights – as relatively successful attempts to facilitate consumers’ reflective choices. In doing so, the thesis applies insights from autonomy-based theories of contract law, with modifications where necessary. The thesis goes against the prevalent theoretical perspectives on consumer law in the literature. On the one hand, it opposes the welfarist view, which considers preference-satisfaction as the underlying principle of consumer law. On the other hand, the thesis challenges the instrumentalist approach to European consumer law, focused on facilitating the EU internal market. The main argument of the thesis is then applied to digital consumer markets and the particular challenges they pose. It also responds to the pluralistic challenge, according to which consumers’ autonomy is not the only principle worth pursuing through consumer law
A divided common good : rhetoric and debates about wealth and status within the Dutch polycentric state, 1763-1790
No full textDefence date: 4 April 2022; Examining board: Prof. Ann Thomson (European University Institute); Prof. Regina Grafe (European University Institute); Prof. Koen Stapelbroek (James Cook University); Prof. Richard Whatmore (University of St. Andrews).This thesis investigates Dutch debates on wealth and status in the Dutch polycentric state in the period between 1763 and 1790. This study aims to show the dynamics and characteristics of contemporary visions of wealth, status, and the common good before the consequences of the French and Industrial Revolutions became evident. It relates contemporary arguments and rhetoric to three themes, namely local and national visions of the common good, the relationship between the United Provinces and overseas territories in Asia, Africa, and the West Indies, and the moral economies that were expressed by contemporaries. For this purpose, it shows how contemporary debates about wealth and status were embedded in different contexts, like stagnation in Holland and Zeeland, the growth of plantation economies in the West Indies, and most importantly, a federal model of political decision making. During the eighteenth century the United Provinces retained their overlapping jurisdiction which consisted of provinces, cities, the stadtholderate, trading companies, and the States General. As a result of this polycentric structure, contemporaries related wealth to local and national frameworks for a variety of purposes, including the aim of protecting privileges or contesting particularist visions by articulating a national idea of the common good. In these debates, commentators often used similar ideas and expressions to articulate different, often
conflicting arguments and interests. At the same time, debates on wealth were connected to social status, which resulted in elaborate discussions about the behaviour of specific individuals and groups. Contemporaries aimed to regulate the behaviour of various groups and individuals, like untrustworthy bankers, Jewish brokers, and the enslaved population of the Dutch overseas territories. The conflicts between local and national views of the common good and the ambiguities relating to perceptions of wealth and status form the subject of this thesis
The shadow line : railway and society in colonial East Africa, c. 1890–1914
No full textDefence date: 26 January 2022Examining Board: Prof. Lucy Riall, (European University Institute); Prof. Corinna Unger, (European University Institute); Prof. Bettina Brockmeyer, (Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen); Prof. Daniel Branch, (University of Warwick)The era of ‘imperial globalization’ at the turn of the twentieth century was also the age of colonial railways. The global network of railway lines has never expanded faster than in the decades before and after 1900. Regarded as terrestrial extensions of marine networks, colonial railways are usually embedded in a history of global integration. Focusing on the case study of the Uganda Railway in present-day Kenya and based on a wide array of primary sources and interviews, the dissertation refines this picture by moving away from a pure macro perspective towards examining the impact of the railway line on specific places and communities in East Africa. The Uganda Railway, built by the British between 1896 and 1901 to connect Uganda with the Indian Ocean, was an engine of rapid and fundamental change even beyond the territories it crossed. As a relational system, the railway line did not have a uniform effect, but led to a plethora of consequences depending on context, location, and actors. Informed by theories and debates in global history, infrastructure studies, and the history of space, the dissertation asks how the railway transformed social and spatial relations in East Africa from the onset of colonial conquest to the First World War, arguing that from the perspective of specific localities the railway was not a medium of integration. Instead, it distorted and disintegrated social, political, and economic relations and established a regime of fragmentation. By telling the story of the division of Maasailand, the deforestation of central Kenya, the emergence of migratory labour, the birth of Nairobi, and the consequences of Nandi resistance, the thesis not only rewrites the common history of the Uganda Railway, but also illuminates the unintended and often neglected consequences of imperial infrastructure that affected the configurations of daily life in East Africa. The thesis thus provides a nuanced understanding of the impact of infrastructures and the techniques of colonialism at a time when all over Africa railway lines heralded the age of high imperialism
From contesting gender stereotypes to questioning anti-stereotyping : a critical analysis of the CJEU gender equality jurisprudence
No full textDefence date: 21 September 2022Examining Board: Prof. Urška Šadl (European University Institute, EUI Supervisor); Prof. Stéphanie Hennette-Vauchez (Université Paris Nanterre, External Supervisor); Prof. Sandra Fredman (University of Oxford); Professor Claire Kilpatrick (European University Institute)Feminist legal scholars have repeatedly highlighted the necessity of understanding gender stereotyping as one limit to women’s emancipation. Anti-stereotyping, developed as a political ideal by EU legislators, aims to free each and every individual from traditional gendered norms. It has however long been confined to the arena of soft law, making only recently a timid entry in the preambles first of the Work/Life Balance Directive, and then of the Women in Boards Directive. Faced with this legislative silence, the CJEU has developed since the 1980s its own meaning of anti-stereotyping, parallel to the persistence of its cases actively stereotyping women. As a result, the Court developed, simultaneously with the use of gender stereotyping in other judgments, anti-stereotyping arguments. Nevertheless, the role of anti-stereotyping in achieving real equality and women’s emancipation needs to be questioned. By assessing the genealogy and the scope of the anti-stereotyping approach in EU gender equality jurisprudence, this thesis reveals the mixed results of anti-stereotyping reasonings for women, from a substantive perspective which understands inequality as a structural and systemic phenomenon. First, the development of anti-stereotyping is shown to be a gendered process, from the perspectives both of its use by mainly men applicants, and of its reception by the Court. In practice, anti-stereotyping reasoning is more often used to guarantee men rights to embrace non-traditionally masculine activities, than to ensure women’s rights to perform traditionally masculine ones. Second, the European anti-stereotyping approach rests upon the assumption that freeing individuals from pre-conceptions on their abilities will enable them to choose their own path, ignoring the social constraints and the structural discriminations faced by women. Ultimately, in its understanding and use of anti-stereotyping, the Court has failed to grasp its full transformative potential, and its jurisprudence in turn serves an androcentric, liberal and individualist understanding of gender equality
Eat the rich : a rethinking of the heritage-crime-development nexus
No full textPublished online: 23 February 2024Since the late 1990s, criminal law solutions have come to play an increasingly important role in the international policy realms of both cultural heritage protection and sustainable development. At the same time, cultural heritage protection has become a key tool in the realisation of the goals of sustainable development, triggering a result wherein the criminalisation of various practices regarded as inimical to the protection of cultural heritage has come to be seen as serving not only the goals of cultural heritage protection per se, but also those of sustainable development more broadly. In this chapter, we argue that the push towards increasing carceralisation in the name of heritage protection and sustainable development is deeply concerning. In making this argument, we draw on two existing streams of scholarship: first, that of human rights scholars who argue that criminalisation often works to uphold existing social and political hegemonies, thus rendering societies more rather than less unjust, and second, that of critical heritage scholars who invite attention to the neo-colonial, Eurocentric, and exclusionary character of cultural heritage protection norms and interventions. We then set out a proposition for potential conceptual reorientations of the heritage-development-crime nexus. We propose that for sustainable development and cultural heritage policy to work to realize the lofty goals to which they aspire, the focus should be on the systemic factors of economic and epistemic injustice rather than the “immoral” crimes of individual actors
Doing diversity? : analyzing support for diversity policies with a conjoint experiment
No full textPublished online: 23 October 2025This study examines hiring managers' (i.e., employees with hiring responsibilities) support for hiring policies aimed at increasing diversity. Research has shown that some policies are more helpful in combating discrimination and increasing diversity than others, but we do not know whether those who apply the policies support them. This is surprising, because hiring managers' support for diversity policies is important for the successful implementation of policies. We discuss three motives underlying policy support: the desire for diversity, the goal of meritocratic hiring, and the maintenance of agency. Using data from an original conjoint experiment collected in the Netherlands (N = 512 individuals), we examine the extent to which hiring managers support diversity policies, whether they prefer other hiring policies, or if they favor the absence of regulations altogether. We find that, rather than policies that increase organizational diversity, hiring managers support policies that preserve their autonomy while maintaining established organizational policies. Marginal means analyses and multilevel regression models show that policy support aligns most strongly with the agency motive alongside concerns about fairness and merit-based selection. Hiring managers prefer an unstructured screening process and are reluctant to support hiring quota and the use of standardized or anonymous application forms. These preferences are particularly pronounced in smaller organizations and where little to no formalized hiring policies are in place. Our findings highlight the need for organizations to address hiring managers' complex motivational concerns, including desires for autonomy, fairness, and status quo maintenance, to ensure effective policy implementation.Valentina Di Stasio was supported by an ERC-Starting Grant funded by the European Research Council (TARGETS, project n. 101041908
Trading at the edge of empires : Francesco Carletti's world, ca. 1600
No full textPublished online: 23 January 2026In narrating his circumnavigation of the world at the turn of the seventeenth century, the Florentine Francesco Carletti became the first European merchant to leave an account of travel on existing commercial routes. A repentant ex-slave trader and smuggler turned dealer in Chinese goods, Carletti travelled “at the edge of empires,” providing a unique perspective on the promise and peril of a connected globe. With his long stays in Lima, Mexico City, Manila, Nagasaki, Macao, and Goa, as well as travels across the Americas, the Pacific, and Asia, Carletti documents a changing world in which European powers and traders interacted and often clashed with other empires and polities. Trading at the Edge of Empires brings together 24 scholars to situate and unpack how Carletti’s travels illuminate our understanding of trade, slavery, empire, religion, language, ethnography, cartography, cosmography, and material culture in the early modern world.-- 1. Brian Brege, Paula Findlen, and Giorgio Riello, Introduction: Trading at the Edge of Empires. Francesco Carletti’s World
-- Part I: Trade, Traders, and Travelers
-- 2. Brian Brege, Francesco Carletti and his Associates, the Medici, and the Interstices of Global Commerce
-- 3. Corey Tazzara, Francesco Carletti on Trade and Empire in the East Indies
-- 4. Lucio Biasiori, Carletti’s Eye between Metaphor and Experience
-- Part II: Ethics, Religion, and Slavery
-- 5. Trevor Burnard, Travelling the Global Selling Slaves: The Dark Side of Carletti’s World
-- 6. Stuart M. McManus, “At the Limits of the Law of a Number of Nations”: Carletti and Slavery in Maritime Asia
-- 7. Eugenio Menegon, Carletti and Religion: Christianity and Asian Traditions in the Ragionamenti
-- 8. Inha Park, Francesco Carletti’s Surprising Legacy: Antonio, Antonio Corea, and Corea
-- Part III: On the Edge of Global Empires
-- 9. Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla, Francesco Carletti and the Spanish Empire: Networks and the Theories of Free Trade
-- 10. Daniela Bleichmar, Travels in the Spanish Indies, on the Ground and on the Page
-- 11. Jorge Flores, Carletti’s Experience of Portuguese Asia
-- 12. Marika Keblusek and Claudia Swan, Carletti’s Case: Trade in the Crosshairs of the VOC Part IV: Language, Vision, and Values
-- 13. Mackenzie Cooley, Of Cocks and Commerce: Sex, Money, and Value in Carletti
-- 14. Anne Gerritsen, Letters, Language and Hieroglyphs: Francesco Carletti’s Observations on Language in China and Japan
-- 15. Miki Sugiura, Carletti in Nagasaki: The Actuality of a Material World Part V: Ethnography, Cartography, and Cosmography
-- 16. Ines G. Županov, Boccaccio in the Tropics: Carletti’s Ethnographic Fragments
-- 17. Joan-Pau Rubiés, “Customs and Manners Strange to Us”: Cultural Diversity in Francesco Carletti
-- 18. Michela Bussotti, A Chinese Atlas and its Italian Description: A New but Unaware Knowledge of the Geography of China
-- 19. Guido van Meersbergen, Francesco Carletti and the World of Sex: Global Bodies and Colonial Desire
-- Part VI: Appraising Global Things
-- 20. Paula Findlen, Carletti's Curiosities: Observing Nature between Florence and the World
-- 21. Lia Markey, Collecting the World in Carletti’s Florence
-- 22. Rebecca Earle, Bread and Fruit: Food in Francesco Carletti’s Ragionamenti
-- 23. Giorgio Riello, Commodifying the World: Carletti’s Global Cargoes
-- Part VII: Returns
-- 24. Brian Brege, Back in Florence: Francesco Carletti’s World in Light of New Archival Discoveries
-- 25. Luca Molà, Italian Travel Narratives and Francesco Carletti's Ragionamenti: A Comparative Overvie
A philosophy of disinformation
No full textPublished online: 10 January 2026As a result of the emergence of the internet and social media, the public space has gained in democracy what it has lost in providing citizens with guidance in the midst of a chaotic communication environment. The methods for combating lies in a democracy are limited and full of paradoxes that must be taken into account, both from an epistemological point of view and in terms of democratic legitimacy. The distinction between fake news and falsified news can be very helpful in this regard