Colonial Pasts, New Approaches and Historiographical Futures: Explorations of GLOBALISE, the Dutch East India Company Archives and the writing of new histories
4-6 March 2026, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam
The archives of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) are invaluable for studying the worlds of the VOC and the often under-documented societies of early modern Africa, Asia, and Australia. Historiography of the early modern Indian Ocean World has traditionally emphasized the centrality of European actors like the Dutch, their institutions and the importance of trade and long-distance connections. This focus, in the case of the VOC, has ignored a broader historical reality of Dutch colonial empire-building in Asia and the Cape, its colonial governance, warfare and crafting of international political structures, control of commodity production, exploitative economic and administrative regimes, enslavement and the creation of new social orders. On the other hand, area studies, non-Western, and world history approaches have used the VOC archives to explore histories of local societies, polities, their interaction with and their resilience in the face of Dutch encroachment. Despite the innovation of these research initiatives, the archive with its immeasurable depth in detail and diversity of themes is still largely unchartered territory.
With digitization and accentuated archival accessibility – a movement that the GLOBALISE project is part of – historical research is rapidly changing. The GLOBALISE project is working to democratize access to the VOC archives using a host of technological advancements such as machine readable transcriptions (HTR), semantic and historical contextualization. Articulating this research redefinition that is presently underway and still to come, the GLOBALISE project can encourage researchers to:
- uncover the understudied yet crucial manifestation of the VOC as a colonizer and their impact on and the resilience of local people and societies.
- underscore the interactions and encounters between societies, polities and cultures that shaped local, regional, and global histories.
- encourage history writing using the VOC archives that is about and goes far beyond the Dutch East India Company.
- identify and unveil new actors, themes and connections that were previously difficult to research due to the opacity of the archival structure and inventories.
In this three-day GLOBALISE Conference, we invite scholars to explore how history writing can and will change with archival digitization and enrichment. We also query how the use of multiple archival corpora (colonial and vernacular) can be used to revisit and interpret information from VOC archives and innovate history writing of the Indian Ocean World, colonialism and global exchanges and encounters.
Conference Themes
We welcome younger and established scholars, either working explicitly with VOC archives, or with other early modern source corpora that interact with the VOC archives and histories addressed in this conference. We welcome a diverse range of approaches and methods addressing one or more of these themes/sub-themes:
The VOC archives and history writing: Critical evaluations of how the VOC archives can support the writing of non-conventional histories.
The VOC as a colonizer:
- Functioning and consequences of colonial expansion, such as conquest and warfare, colonial rule, deportation, genocide;
- Labour regimes – e.g. slavery and slave trade, corvée and cultivation labour regimes, (early histories of) contract labour, convict and penal systems;
- Political formations, forms of diplomacy, contracts, sovereignty and empire, e.g. development of Asian polities under and beyond colonial expansion; Transformations, resilience and exchanges of Asian societies in the face of European encounter, encroachment and colonization.
Decentering histories of the VOC and exploiting the potential of an unlocked archive:
- Maritime Indian Ocean histories; Inter-imperial and trans-imperial convergences and divergences – between the different European and Asian polities in Asia, but also with the rest of the world;
- Identity formation and social categorizations – e.g. the development and formation of caste, religious, social, racial and other categories;
- Micro-histories, histories of everyday life and interactions;
- Cultural exchanges and the making, transformation and circulation of knowledge;
- Histories of mobility, histories of food, disease, environment, weather, commodity frontiers.
Digital approaches and the colonial archive: The challenges and potential of applying digital historical methods to the colonial archive.
Conference and Workshop: Practical Information
Conference
The conference will be held from Wednesday 4 March to Friday 6 March 2026, at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam.
We envision thematic parallel sessions with paper presentations. There will be plenary keynote lectures and round table sessions on historical debates, new methods and historiographical implications. Conference participants will be invited to submit their papers in advance, which will be pre-circulated to other participants.
Digital Humanities Workshop, 4 March 2026
The conference will begin with a half-day digital humanities workshop which will discuss the tools and methods used by the GLOBALISE infrastructure, and will invite participants to work with project output. This is open to conference participants interested in new DH technologies as practiced in GLOBALISE.
If you would like to participate in the workshop, please indicate in your submission what you would be interested in to learn or discuss, and how your research will benefit from participation in this workshop.
Abstract Submission
We invite doctoral students, early-career scholars as well as established scholars to submit abstracts to present papers at the conference. Abstract submissions should follow this format:
1. Name, position and institutional affiliation
2. Title of abstract
3. Abstract (max. 400 words)
4. Short CV (max. 1 A4)
5. Indication of need for financial support for travel and/or visa (see section on funding for more information).
6. Indication of interest in the DH Workshop (max. 100 words).
Submissions should be sent as a single PDF file before 7 September 2025 by email to melinda.susanto[at] huygens.knaw.nl including your full name in the subject: “GLOBALISE Conference Abstract Submission: Your Full Name”.
Successful applicants will be contacted by 1 October 2025 and will be invited to submit short conference papers (6,000-8,000 words) before 1 February 2026. Papers will be pre-circulated to conference participants.
Important Dates
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 7 September 2025
Notification of accepted abstracts: 1 October 2025
Deadline for submission of papers: 1 February 2026
DH Workshop: 4 March 2026
GLOBALISE Conference: 4 March – 6 March 2026
Conference Participation Funding
We intend to provide accommodation for selected international participants presenting at the conference.
We have a limited budget to assist with funding the travel and visa expenses for doctoral and early career scholars from Asia and South Africa, and scholars with no institutional funding. Participants who would like to apply for funding support should explicitly mention this when submitting their abstracts and explain their situation.
Contact information
For more information, or any questions about the conference and participation, please contact melinda.susanto[at]huygens.knaw.nl. Substitute [at] with @ when sending the email.
