The Research Group on Global and Mediterranean Economic and Social History studies the development, structure and transformations of the economies and societies of the Mediterranean, as well as their interaction with and integration into the larger globalizing world in the modern and contemporary eras. It undertakes the comparative study of economic development in different areas and time periods, and focuses on the economic, social, institutional and cultural change during the period of transition from the pre-industrial to the industrial world. Research is focusing on the living and work conditions of the Mediterranean populations, their social and geographical movements, as well as the formation of land settlement and rural and social landscape patterns. Researchers pursue an interdisciplinary approach combining economics with social, political and cultural history as well as business history and economic geography.
In its field of interests, the Section on Global and Mediterranean Economic and Social History organises research projects, conferences, seminar courses and lectures and provides publications and open-access databases. In collaboration with University Departments it will organize and offer Programs of Postgraduate and Doctoral Studies.
The purpose of this research project is to produce a historical account of the evolution of Greece’s tobacco sector in the period that spans between the end of the Greek Civil War (1949) and the country’s accession into the EEC in 1981.
The aim of the research project “Land Ownership and Family Farm Income in Nineteenth-Century Greece: The Unpublished Land “Registers” of the Kapodistrian Period (1830)” is to study a number of local agricultural statistics produced during the tenure of President Ioannis Kapodistrias (1828-1831) and hitherto unknown in the literature, and to utilise them in order to draw conclusions about the distribution of wealth and farm income in rural Greece at the end of the War of Independence.
Scientific coordinator: Leda Papastefanaki
This research project aims at deepening the understanding in the history of mining activities and the formation of the mining landscapes in Greece during 19th-20th centuries.
Scientific coordinator: Socrates Petmezas
IMS-FORTH and the Department of History and Archaeology of the University of Crete co-organized two international conferences of Economic and Social History (organizers: Christos Hadjiiossif and Socrates Petmezas):
Credit Activities in Eastern Mediterranean : Economic and Social Aspects, ca. 1750-1920
Rethymno, 29-30 September 2000
Participants (apart from the organizers):
Les Societes Mediterraneennes dans un Age de Globalisation et de Crise (1873-1896)
Rethymno, 25-27 August 2003
Participants (apart from the organizers):
Inquiring Temporal Otherness: Timekeeping and Attitudes towards Time in the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire (16th-20th c.)
Rethymno, IMS-FORTH, 23-24 October 2015.
Participants (apart from the organizers):
