Accounting for Ukraine: Low Countries Capitalism and the Making of a National Space, 1870–1922

PhD project
as part of the Competence Network Interdisciplinary Ukraine Studies (KIU) 
Supervisor of this project: Prof. Dr. Jan C. Behrends

This project examines how Belgian and Dutch economic and diplomatic actors perceived, interpreted, and engaged with the industrial Donbas, Kryvyi Rih, and Black Sea littoral from the 1870s onward. It traces how these regions, long approached through the frameworks of Russian imperial rule, foreign investment, infrastructure, commerce, and extraction, were reinterpreted during the political upheavals of the early twentieth century. Rather than treating the region solely as an object of economic history or internal nation-building, the project asks how commercial and industrial entanglements shaped outside responses to revolution, imperial collapse, and competing claims to sovereignty. In doing so, it explores how the Russian imperial south was transformed in Belgian and Dutch economic and diplomatic knowledge from an imperial resource and investment frontier into a politically contested space claimed as Ukrainian.