Archives of Resistance: 90 years of the International Institute of Social History (IISH)

Walking through the eastern docklands of Amsterdam, past the canals and old warehouses, a large, unadorned white building on Cruquiusweg passes almost unnoticed. A former cocoa warehouse, it now stands silent above the water, its only clue a rather modest line of white words over the main entrance: Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis. Few would guess that beyond those walls, meticulously organized into thousands of archival collections spanning more than 50 kilometers of shelf space, five centuries of transnational political activism and dissent are preserved. 

This year marks 90 years since the founding of the International Institute of Social History (IISH), one of the twelve institutions of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and a world leading research center in the field of social and economic history. Established in 1935 by Dutch economic historian and Professor Nicolaas Willem Posthumus (1880-1960), the IISH was born from the urgency to preserve the endangered legacy of social movements and radical thinkers within a Europe sliding into violent authoritarianism. 

History 
In 1935, a gloomy political climate was sweeping across Europe: half of its nations were governed by authoritarian regimes, with Italy and Germany witnessing the rise and consolidation of unprecedentedly repressive governments. Amid this terror, entire libraries, documents, and associations that did not fit within the political environment were readily blacklisted, running the risk of being permanently destroyed by those in power.

In this context, a small group of historians and librarians led by Posthumus and Annie Adama van Scheltema (1844-1977) embarked on a new, urgent project: saving everything possible about the legacy of the European labor movement. The institute’s founders began smuggling radical documents across the world, starting with the original manuscripts of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels from Nazi Germany, which remain among the IISH’s most important holdings. Shortly after the 1938 Nazi march on Vienna, Mikhail Bakunin’s anarchist writings were also smuggled out of Austria, followed by the entire archives of the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist trade union Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) and the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI) just weeks before Francisco Franco’s conquest of the last Spanish territories in 1939. 

After the Nazis occupied the Netherlands in May 1940, however, German SS officials broke into the institute, temporarily closing it after interrogating both Scheltema and Posthumus who, in the meantime, had managed to send the most precious collections to London to hide them. 
After 1945, when collecting documents became easier, the IISH began a slow yet steady recovery, turning progressively into the global treasure of dissent that it is today. 

Research 
A brief look at the IISH catalogue speaks volumes about the truly remarkable variety of the institute’s holdings: Marx and Engels’ original manuscripts, Rosa Luxemburg’s letters, Bakunin’s anarchist texts, collections of Chinese communist posters, thousands of socialist newspapers, colonial photographs from Dutch Indonesia, hours of recorded interviews, pamphlets, pins, banners, and much more.

Beyond its rich archival collection, however, the IISH also serves as a vibrant research center, home to an international team of nearly 40 scholars interested in labor history, resistance movements, inequality and slavery. The results of their research and the information preserved in the IISH’s collections are shared as widely as possible: the archives and library are open for consultation completely free of charge, and most materials are accessible online. Crucially, the institute operates from a position of social commitment, actively engaging with current debates through a rich series of free public activities, workshops and lectures.

The memory of social struggle is a key component in building social movements: if you do not know that other people before you have challenged these immensely powerful structures, the barriers for challenging them yourself become so much higher.

Academic research and social movements
Today, amid the violent resurgence of the radical right and the unfolding of a 21st century genocide, the history of the IISH speaks to us with renewed relevance, raising pressing questions about the role of academic research, institutions and archival collections in the lived – often dramatic – realities of contemporary social movements. How can scholarship still serve collective struggle and resistance? How can it avoid retreating into an inaccessible, first-class ivory tower? 

A conversation with Senior Researcher at the IISH and Global Economic and Social History Professor at the Vrije Universiteit, Pepijn Brandon, helps us reflect on this question.

Pepijn Brandon’s research focuses on the history of capitalism, Dutch colonial history, war and economic development, and slavery. His academic path, as he explains, has always been intertwined with activism. “I always had an interest in the intellectual aspect of the critique of capitalism,” he recalls, “which, at first, was not academic, but I carried it into my studies.”
He first came into contact with the IISH during his first year of university in the late 1990s, in the context of a research project on the May ‘68 movement. “I remember opening boxes full of radical pamphlets and protest literature,” he tells me. “Later, I started to go deeper into the history of early capitalism.”

Memory, social struggle and archives
I ask Professor Brandon why it is important to still preserve these documents today.
“Social movements never arise in a vacuum”, he answers. “Partly, they are interventions in a long stream of people challenging the structures of power and the repression that ordinary people face when they want to change something.” He emphasizes the importance of preserving the memory of resistance. “The memory of social struggle is a key component in building social movements: if you do not know that other people before you have challenged these immensely powerful structures, the barriers for challenging them yourself become so much higher. “It is a very simple thing,” he adds, “but that is why social movements throughout history have always constructed stories about where they fit in longer histories. And to do that, you need to preserve the memory.”

I touch upon the issue of the frequent separation between academic research, archives and the reality of contemporary social movements, asking him how he reflects on it. He talks about a “paradox”. “In order to do the kind of safeguarding operation that the IISH did,” he explains, “people knew that having these documents in the possession of the social movement involved in the struggle was an acute risk and that they needed to place them within the formalized structure of an archive, where access could be guaranteed. But that, of course, always creates some separation from the social movements themselves.” He notes that, at times, the institute’s possession of certain collections - such as the archive of the Spanish Confederación Nacional del Trabajo - has been contested by groups claiming to be their rightful inheritors. “That’s why the Institute has long relied on consultation and negotiation with social movements,” he adds.

Academia and power 
We then talk about the relationship between academia and power structures.
Professor Brandon tells me: “I would consider myself a socially engaged scholar, and my research as contributing, in some way, to the critique of the horrific state of the world. And there are, of course, many academics that think that way.” He adds: “But academia is definitely a part of the power structures of that horrible world, and not a separate island. At the same time, however, especially in the second half of the 20th century, academia was often the only place where people who wanted to critique society could have a job that allowed them to do so. And, in many ways, today’s attacks of the right on academia are based on the same premises.”

I ask him whether he ever became disillusioned with academic research. Smiling, he answers: “Despite the fact that academia can be a radical space, there is always pressure to conform intellectually. I have been very lucky in this regard and always encountered supervisors that encouraged me to think outside of the box and find my own voice.” He then becomes serious: “However, there have been moments in which I have been confronted with the non-radical and suffocating nature of academia and, for me, the best example is the attitude of universities towards the genocide in Gaza, the immense obstacles thrown in our way to intellectually make sense of this moment in history and the amount of repression faced by students who demanded a space to do that.”

I finally ask him what a socially engaged academic practice could look like. “My ideal of a socially engaged scholarship cannot take shape in isolation within the walls of academia: it is not an individual thinking exercise. A socially engaged scholarship can only exist in a living and breathing relationship to social movements outside academia.” He pauses. “It is a struggle to remain a socially engaged scholar in the conservative environment of a university, and everyone who tries to do so inevitably will hit some walls. You need to persevere but also be aware that doing that does not just depend on a set of personal choices, but really on the relationships you build with others inside and outside of academia.”

90 years after its founding, the white building on Cruquiusweg still stands quietly above the water, holding tightly within it the memories of those who refused silence. It remains today a precious shelter for the fragile traces of dissent and a space for those who like to trace the path of past struggles. Faced with increasing right-wing repression, it is a quiet reminder that remembering, preserving and researching can, themselves, be a political act of resistance.

Sources: 
• Official website of the IISH: www.iisg.amsterdam/en 
• Jaap Kloosterman and Jan Lucassen, ‘Rebels with a Cause: Five Centuries of Social History Collected by the International Institute of Social History’ (Routledge Taylor & Francis Group: 2017)
• Marc Lace, ‘Academic Participation in Social Movements: A Call for Ethical Review’, Open for Debate, 31st December 2018 [accessed 13/10/2025]
• Ladan Rahbari et al., ‘Activism and Academia: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue on Academic Freedom and Social Engagement’, Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management 47:1 (2024), 73-89