Richard Beck is a researcher in colonial history with a particular interest in migration and the recruitment of forced labour in the Dutch East Indies and Southeast Asia. 

Richard works as a junior researcher at KITLV. He conducts research on the colonial history of the Dutch Taxing and Customs authorities in the Dutch East Indies. He earned a Bachelor degree in History and International Studies (2023) and finished a Humanities Research Master in Global History (2025) at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Additionally, he worked as an intern and research assistant at the International Institute of Social History (IISG) in Amsterdam (2024, 2025). 

During his studies, he specialised in the study of colonial rhetoric on Race and Gender in the context of indentured labour recruitment in the East Coast of Sumatra. At the IISG, he studied the net migration of cities in Indonesia, the Philippines, and the Straits Settlements, for which he wrote an article and created a dataset. 

Publication

Beck, Richard [in print], ‘Cross-cultural urban migration in maritime Southeast Asia 1800-2000: Some guesstimates', IISH Working Paper 57, 2026.