The research group Economies, Comparisons, Connections (ECC) brings together historians and social scientists who study the interaction of historical processes at varying geographical, social, political, environmental and economic scales. The focus on Economies, Comparisons and Connections is applied to a variety of research topics: case- and regional studies of both rural and urban history; broader societal shifts with trans-regional ramifications; and various models of explanation for economic and social change on a global scale and in the long-term. We pay attention to different units of analysis (households, regions, economies, societies, states, landscapes, networks etc.), to bottom-up regional research (including anthropological methods and field-work), and to methods to investigate processes on wider and global scales (comparative analysis, system-analysis, network-analysis). We construe the notion of ‘economy’ in a broad sense, to include economies of status, or affection, social power relations, and political economy. ECC questions the boundaries and scales of space and place, focusing on the co-construction of the local, the regional and the global, with special attention to (local) agency in regional, cross-regional and global processes.