GLOBALISE

Consisting of approximately twenty-five million pages, the UNESCO Memory of the World-listed archives of the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, VOC) offer a unique view on interactions between European and non-European actors in Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Currently, however, doing research on this vast collection of handwritten documents is extremely challenging.

The GLOBALISE project of the Huygens Institute and five partners will change this. Over the period 2021-2026, and in close collaboration with scholars from all over the world, we will develop an online infrastructure that unlocks the key series of VOC documents and reports for advanced new research methods. At the same time, the infrastructure will engage the wider public with this many-sided and increasingly hotly-debated period of Dutch overseas history.

In this 3-minute video we introduce our project and explain the possible uses of the GLOBALISE infrastructure by scholars, heritage institutions and the wider public interested in the history of early globalisation and colonialism.

News

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Twitter

Follow us on Twitter (@_GLOBALISE) to stay up to date on the GLOBALISE project.

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Latest blog posts

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  Textile Taxonomies – GLOBALISE’s efforts in defining traded textiles in the Indian Ocean Region
  by Henrike Vellinga
  April 5, 2023
  Do you know what a roll of ‘periemoenemolam’ is? Or what ‘gorgorongs’ are for that matter? Chance is, that you will at some point encounter cryptic terms like these as types of traded goods in the archives of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). VOC ships carried a wide range of commodities in their holds. […]
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  Aligning GLOBALISE with Researchers’ Needs
  by Merve Tosun
  March 1, 2023
  While reading through archival records, you probably often come across names of people or places that you are unfamiliar with. In those moments, nothing is better than having access to resources that have already provided context on those historical persons or places. If your curiosity is tickled enough after such encounters, or secondary resources do […]
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  The (Ground) Truth is out there: an introduction to GLOBALISE’s use of Handwritten Text Recognition
  by Maartje Hids and Kay Pepping
  December 13, 2022
  Anyone who has ever worked with the archives of the Dutch East India Company is bound to be impressed with its sheer scope. Even when limiting its ambitions to the letters, reports and other documents sent over from Asia to the Dutch Republic, GLOBALISE is faced with thousands of inventory numbers. Each of those numbers […]
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  Automatic Event Detection in Early Modern Dutch (VOC) documents: the Annotation Phase
  by Stella Verkijk
  October 4, 2022
  In order to unlock as much information as possible from our archives, a big part of the GLOBALISE project is developing software that can automatically detect events in the texts. This would mean, for example, that you could search for and extract data about events like shipwrecks, armed conflicts, or even more fine-grained events like […]
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  Rediscovering Early Modern Polities: First Thoughts on Dataset Creation
  by Manjusha Kuruppath
  June 30, 2022
  You have been pouring over the archives for weeks together in search of precious information on your research subject. Just when you thought you had laid your hands on the document that would answer your research question (forgive the slight exaggeration here), you hit upon the name of a place or person that you know nothing […]

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Job openings

We currently have no job openings at GLOBALISE. Check this page, our Twitter or Academic Transfer for future job openings.

The source

GLOBALISE unlocks the so-called ‘Overgekomen Brieven en Papieren’ (‘Letters and papers received’, OBP), the key series of VOC documents and reports that were sent over from the company’s Asian headquarters in Batavia (now Jakarta in Indonesia) to the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This series of more than 5 million handwritten pages is of crucial importance to our understanding of the history of the world. It provides detailed and structured overviews of historical events and social, political, and economic developments occurring in the vast region where the VOC was active.

This region stretched from modern-day Yemen to Japan, encompassing the Indonesian archipelago, Sri Lanka, the coasts of India, Bangladesh and Myanmar, the island of Taiwan, and various Chinese cities. The documents also provide information on Madagascar, scattered regions on the east coast of Africa, and the area around Cape Town. Covering almost the entire seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the OBP form the most complete and extensive body of sources on early modern world history. For some regions, the documents in this archival series are among the earliest written historical sources.

The documents and reports provide information on a wide range of subjects. Trade features most prominently. On the first picture below (click images for large versions), Dutch vessels are visible on the river Ganges at Hugli, just north of Kolkata. But there is much more going on in this picture. On the right, a local official set up camp, probably to negotiate with representatives of the VOC. This is also reported on in the OBP, as are the local plants and animals, and the religious ceremony at the back. Other topics covered by the VOC reports are the vicious wars waged by the company in name of the Dutch Republic, such as the conquest of Macassar on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi in 1667, depicted on the second picture below, and the as yet under-researched topic of slavery in Asia (third picture).

The importance of the OBP has long been recognised, and much effort has been made to make this source better accessible for researchers. Between 1960 and 2017, the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands and its predecessors published annotated selections of the General Letters, a collection of summarising reports within the OBP (link to online version). Even though the series consists of 14 hefty book volumes, it covers only about one-sixth of the available material. To improve the accessibility of the original documents, the project ‘Towards a New Age of Partnership’ (TANAP) compiled a database with short descriptions of documents in VOC archives held in various places around the world. Also, sections of the OBP have been translated to make them available for non-Dutch researchers. Cheng Shaogang for example translated sections related to the history of Taiwan into Chinese.

Technological advancements now make it possible to go much further in unlocking this source. The National Archives of the Netherlands are in the process of scanning all their VOC material (scans are accessible through the online inventory, the part of the OBP sent to the Amsterdam chamber of the VOC can be found in the inventory number range 1053-4454; documents and reports sent to the Zeeland chamber in the range 7527-11024). In a project called ‘De ijsberg zichtbaar maken’ (2018-2021), c. 1 million pages of handwritten VOC material were automatically transcribed. The transcriptions are available for browsing and searching on this website. The GLOBALISE project takes it from there.

The project

Our team processes the material provided by the National Archives to allow for advanced querying, and thus facilitate large-scale, in-depth and structured analyses of interactions between European and above all non-European actors in and around the VOC empire.

In the short (Dutch-language) video below, project leader Matthias van Rossum explains how we do this and discusses the impact on research with Cátia Antunes, Professor of History of Global Economic Networks at Leiden University.

We apply an innovative combination of semantic and historical contextualisation methods on the automatically generated transcriptions of the handwritten original documents and reports in the OBP. Our teams recognise and identify entities (such as places, persons and commodities) and events in the text, and link these to a comprehensive collection of historical reference data related to VOC history—accurate historical contextual information, compiled from a broad variety of European and Asian sources. For this, we highly welcome relevant data collections of students and scholars around the world. Moreover, using state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) technology, we place the entities, events, and their interrelations in a knowledge graph, structured by an ontology. Hence comes the full name of the project: General Letters Ontology-Based AccessibiLity InfraStructurE (acronym GLOBALISE).

This will lead to a breakthrough in research practices. Currently, a researcher who wants to know how many slaves were transported by the VOC from Madagascar to VOC settlements in Asia would generally perform simple search queries in the edited volumes of the General Letters or the transcribed sections of the VOC archive, using search strings such as ‘slaaf*’, ‘slave*’, ‘leyfeygen*’, ‘lijffeygen*’ and ‘l*f*ge*’ to find mentions of enslaved people. This yields multiple series of single references to slavery, including slave trading or transportation, but also references to slave-based production, control over the enslaved, slave uprisings, etc. After closely reading the references, the researcher selects the ones that are relevant for further, manual processing. With the GLOBALISE infrastructure, a future researcher can build a query to specifically retrieve observations on transportations of enslaved people from Madagascar, with their respective destinations. These results are ready to be processed using quantitative and qualitative research methods.

The GLOBALISE infrastructure will allow researchers to answer new and more complex research questions. For example, with regard to the seventeenth-century sugar boom in Taiwan, it is known that the establishment of this industry was related to the settlement of Chinese planters and migrants. At the same time, much less is known about the sugar industry itself, such as the labour relations on the plantations. VOC officials for example reported the need for slave labour. Would it be possible that both Chinese migrants and enslaved workers from other parts of Asia were employed in the sugar industry? With the opportunities the GLOBALISE infrastructure provides to query observations on the development of sugar production, Chinese migration and slave imports, researchers will be able to analyse their possible relations in depth. The results of these scholarly endeavours will have important implications for debates on plantation societies and slave labour regimes, and on the impact and legacy of colonialism.

We also aim to engage the wider public to explore the rich collection of documents and reports in the OBP and learn about the history of early globalisation and colonialism. Users from around the world will be able to explore the source material through an easy-to-use interface. We also actively appeal to the public to help us improve our infrastructure. Citizen scientists can correct transcription errors and wrongly identified entities, supplement the available contextual information, and add extra layers of interpretation. Learn more about how you can contribute to the project on this page.

The GLOBALISE infrastructure is not reserved for the Dutch East India Company’s view of the world. It will be open to additional source material, such as documents of Asian rulers and polities.

Our team

Project management & user interaction

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Technical infrastructure

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Historical contextualisation

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Semantic contextualisation

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Former team members

Sterre Berentzen
Student assistant, Historical contextualisation (September 2022 - February 2023)

Maartje Hids
Student assistant, Historical contextualisation (February 2022 - January 2023)

Andy Houwer
Intern, Historical contextualisation (September - December 2022)

Gerhard de Kok
Postdoc, Semantic contextualisation (February – August 2022)

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Guest researchers

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Steering committee

Matthias van Rossum
International Institute for Social History, NL

Cátia Antunes
Leiden University, NL
Sebastiaan Derks
Huygens Institute, NL
Dirk van Miert
Huygens Institute, NL
Julia Noordegraaf
University of Amsterdam, NL
Menno Rasch
KNAW Humanities Cluster, NL
Piek Vossen
VU University Amsterdam, NL

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Advisory board

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User panel

Partners

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GLOBALISE is financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).