Dutch Social Reformers in Transnational Space, 1840-1914: Reflections on the CLARIAH Research Pilot 2TBI

Linked data is rapidly entering the practice of historical research. The project underlying this contribution (2TBI) set out to link a research database of persons who were internationally active in the 19th and early 20th century, with the person entity repository of currently online available biographical resources in the Netherlands. The result is a group of 1115 Dutch social reformers, whom we can now easily trace in various datasets. The research objective of this paper is to show to what extent and in which ways these social reformers were active at the local level, on a national scale, and at international congresses, in order to explore the transnational embeddedness of the reform issues that they were involved with. This ties in with current historiographical debates about the origins of the welfare state, which look beyond the legislative achievements at the national level.