This portal aims to facilitate new, cooperative research practices in the field of comparative and global social economic history. Global history sets specific demands on research data. To collect really comparable data, agreements have to be made on definitions, estimation methods, annotation and documentation. The data may have to be processed in order make them available to the research community. To create such valuable datasets, intense cooperation between scholars all over the world is needed. This cooperation can benefit from ICT-enabled platforms that create ‘virtual research environments’ or ‘collaboratories’.

In this portal several international working groups have a platform for cooperation:

HISCO This collaboratory aims to create an occupational information system that is both international and historical, and simultaneously links to existing classifications used for present-day conditions. The information system uses a historical international classification of occupations (HISCO) to combine various kinds of information on their tasks and duties in historical settings. 

Historical Life Courses The aim of this collaboratory is to bring together the main users, developers and administrators of databases with historical life courses. The historical community is fortunate to have a growing number of large-scale, public databases of life histories from the past.  Working with this kind of data is not an easy task. In this collaboratory, besides providing information and exchanging opinions, we work to create common data structures and software. 

History of Labour Relations This collaboratory makes an inventory of all types of labour relations worldwide, varying from slavery, indentured labour and share cropping, to free wage labour and self-employment from 1500 up until today. Besides the initial aim to gather statistical data on all types of labour relations, the group is currently developing an international research proposal aimed at explaining the rise and decline of types of labour relations from 1500 to 2000. 

Migration Organizations The collaboratory of the Group ‘Constructing a global database on Migrant Organizations’ starts from a Political Opportunities Structures (POS) approach and has the ambition to create a comparative framework to analyse immigrant organizing processes. The databases contain information on nationality, ethnic origin, religion and the scale of operations of the organization: local, regional or national.

Global Inequality This project aims to set up a data-infrastructure for the study of long term economic change in the world economy in the past four to five centuries, with special focus on the most recent 200 years - the period of the Great Divergence. The idea is that new theoretical developments have greatly increased our understanding of the long term dynamics of the wold economy this period, but that we need more and better data to really test and refine these new ideas and hypotheses.

Labour Conflicts Labour conflicts are an important phenomenon in the history of capitalism, but also in other societies in which unequal labour relations exist. Through labour conflicts, social, economic, political and legal relations have been greatly altered.  The International Institute of Social History (IISH) has taken the initiative to set up a moderated list of data files of strikes, lockouts and other labour conflicts. Scholars working in this field are invited to register their work, and to make their data available through the internet.

Russian Historical Statistics  The aim of the project is to create an on-line electronic repository of Russian historical statistics. The repository operates on the principle of a historical data-hub, bringing together data extracted from various published and unpublishedsources in one place. The repository provides regional level data, standardised to facilitate access and to enable comparative research over time and across space. The principal focus of the data-hub is Russian economic and social history of the last three centuries (18th-21st).