Dylan Tzu-Yi Hsu is a PhD candidate in Global Economic and Social History at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research examines how early modern global processes took shape in local societies. She is particularly interested in how commodity exchange became embedded in colonial settings, where production, exchange, and local obligations were reorganized into new forms of dependency and authority. Her doctoral research approaches these questions through seventeenth-century Dutch Formosa.
Before turning to colonial and global history, her training was grounded in Chinese institutional history and comparative approaches to Chinese and European historical development. This background first led her to examine the relationship between Chinese commercial organization and the wider world economy. From 2019 to 2021, she studied colonial and global history at Leiden University, where she began working with Dutch archival sources and expanded her earlier training in Chinese-European comparison into a broader global historical framework. This development led her to pay closer attention to local societies that had often remained in the background of studies centered on Chinese commercial expansion and overseas trade. Since joining Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in 2022, her work has been further shaped by the history of capitalism and critical approaches to coercion, dependency, and colonial political economy.
Outside academia, she enjoys street dance, playing electric guitar, and collecting. The pieces she is most pleased with at the moment are her Air Jordan 1 OG sneakers. She currently lives in the Netherlands with four mischievous cats.
