The walls of Antwerp’s old buildings and streets still hold the records of the city’s early modern trade in goods, people, and enslaved labour—and this project will translate and map those hidden histories. This matters because the stories of how colonial wealth shaped European cityscapes are often invisible, buried in merchant letters and notarial acts written in seven languages. Without that knowledge, we cannot fully understand how transnational exploitation built the physical fabric of cities like Antwerp, nor how those connections continue to shape inequality today. The project fills a gap by linking specific buildings and streets to the flows of sugar, enslaved people, and capital that sustained them. If successful, the research will produce a publicly searchable database of over 2,000 documents, interactive maps matching trade flows to Antwerp locations, and a virtual reality experience connecting the Huis van Aken palace to a Brazilian sugar plantation. These tools could reshape how heritage professionals, urban planners, and educators approach the decolonisation of knowledge—turning city streets into readable records of global interconnection rather than silent monuments to local history.
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The early modern period (c. 1450-1800) witnessed a remarkable growth in flows of goods, ideas, people, languages and art forms both across and between continents. The buildings, squares and streets of early modern cities were shaped by these flows and exchanges with other places, exchanges that, while sometimes mutually beneficial, were often unequal and could lead to disorientation, oppression, exploitation and even violence. With its range of trans- and intercontinental connections, diverse population, and different experiences of colonialism, sixteenth-century Antwerp, the so-called 'economic powerhouse' of early modern Europe and today an international port city in Belgium, will serve as the project's principal case study. This research takes the expression 'if walls could talk' literally: it aims to examine the often-overlooked histories embedded in buildings and streets that are linked to a city's early modern connections to other places. Through examining these, the project will also reveal the stories of these other places, demonstrating that the histories of connected places are inextricably linked and that you cannot understand one without understanding the other. Among the factors facilitating these transnational flows were the social relationships forged over long distances between merchants in commercial centres and their agents in far-away locations. The project will create summaries in English of a large cache (2000+ documents) of Antwerp merchant correspondence, notarial acts documenting these merchants' business transactions, and merchant family chronicles, the originals in seven different languages. These will be used to produce a publicly searchable database from which users will also be able to create visualisations of the networks in which Antwerp participated. Interactive maps will then be produced that match the flows to specific buildings, streets and objects in Antwerp, with themes like colonialism and the linguistic landscape offering new insights into the patterns of transnational influences in the cityscape. A third research strand will offer an interconnected history of the Huis van Aken (an Antwerp palace) and the Engenho São Jorge dos Erasmos (a former Brazilian sugar plantation belonging to the owners of the palace). This will allow for an in-depth examination of the flows creating this connection, including that between the enslaved labour on the plantation and the wealth flowing back to Antwerp. Improving our understanding not only of how economic, religious, political and social connections wrought technological, environmental and aesthetic changes on a city's fabric, but also of the experiences of individuals on the other side of these exchanges, the project will contribute to the decolonisation of knowledge. It will also promote the concept of transnational heritage as a useful way of understanding the way that early modern flows have become materialised in the cityscape and of how, in belonging to one place, an individual also belongs to all the other places connected to their home. This concept informs the project's heritage policy work. It also underlies the virtual reality experience that will be created to provide a visceral experience of the interconnectedness between the Antwerp palace and Brazilian sugar plantation. As UN Secretary-General Guterres warned at COP27: 'Humanity has a choice: cooperate or perish.' The top-down approach to addressing global challenges is clearly not effective on its own. Planetary consciousness also needs to be nurtured within and between communities. Cities, home to more than half of humanity, contain historical links within their fabric that can engender this sense of interconnection and responsibility to different parts of the world. This project develops crucial insights and tools for bringing these connections alive for urban residents and others, providing a path forward amidst the global crises and uncertainties of our age.
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