Indonesia's history is defined by hundreds of smaller kingdoms. Professor Hans Hägerdal discusses the challenges of documenting these diverse polities and introduces the Kerajaan2 Indonesia dataset, a digital resource for tracing the genealogies of the archipelago's many royal houses, which was instrumental for creating the Globalise polities dataset.
Lina de Swaaf reflects on the GLOBALISE conference, from keynotes and academic papers to roundtable discussions and performance lectures.
Based on her internship and a roundtable discussion during the GLOBALISE conference, Tara Huveneers explores how VOC archives can become more accessible and meaningful to diverse, community-connected users.
Linda Robertus uses the medical journal from a 1738 voyage to Ceylon to illustrate her work on a dataset of medical terminology drawn from 18th-century VOC surgeons’ journals.
This post explores how natural language search opens up new ways of discovering hidden stories in the VOC archives, from environmental interventions and religious policies to the lives and activities of women.
GLOBALISE held the roundtable “The Changing Archive: Digitization, Translation, and Historical Research on the Early Modern Indian Ocean World” on 2 December 2025. This post summarizes the key points of discussion.
This blog traces the fragmented story of Maria, an enslaved woman from Liuqiu. Her case exposes the violence masked by the Dutch East India Company’s claims of humane governance and shows how projects such as GLOBALISE and Voices of Resistance are transforming our ability to uncover marginalized lives and the afterlives of colonial genocide.
Nikhil Bellarykar, an external collaborator with the GLOBALISE project, shares practical strategies for finding historical place names in VOC records using the GLOBALISE transcriptions viewer.
Asawari Luthra joined the GLOBALISE project as a guest researcher in the period June 2024 – May 2025. In this blog, she tells about the ethnographic research she conducted to explore how access to GLOBALISE’s digital infrastructure can be made safer and more decolonised.
On 6 February 1642, the ships of Jacob Liesvelt, merchant of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), arrived at the Thoron bay on the coast of Quinam. Here, he sent…
