We are pleased to announce the GLOBALISE Conference
Colonial Pasts, New Approaches and Historiographical Futures
Explorations of GLOBALISE, the Dutch East India Company Archives and the writing of new histories
to be held from 4 to 6 March 2026, with pre-conference activities on 3 March.
The archives of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) offer crucial insights into both Dutch colonialism and the histories of early modern societies in Africa, Asia, and Australia. Traditional historiography has focused on trade and European actors, often overlooking the VOC’s colonial governance, exploitation, and the resilience of local communities. Recent approaches in area studies and global history have used the VOC archives to explore these overlooked dimensions.
The GLOBALISE project is transforming historical research by digitizing and enriching VOC archives through technologies like machine-readable transcriptions and historical contextualization. This opens new possibilities for writing inclusive, comparative, and long-term histories that integrate colonial, global, and vernacular perspectives.
This conference aims to open up discussions about how digital tools and multiple archival sources – both colonial and vernacular – can reshape the way we study the VOC, the Indian Ocean World, and broader patterns of global exchanges and colonial encounters.
Location: International Institute of Social History, Cruquiusweg 31, 1019 AT Amsterdam.
Preliminary program
Note: this program is subject to change.
Tuesday 3 March 2026 Pre-conference Activities
| Time | Venue | |
| 13.00 – 13.15 | Welcome and coffee | |
| 13.15 – 14.15 | Getting to know GLOBALISE sessions 1-3 | Parallel rooms |
| 14.15 – 14.30 | Short break | |
| 14.30 – 15.30 | Getting to know GLOBALISE sessions 1-3 | Parallel rooms |
| 15.30 – 17.00 | Guided walking tour (optional/registered) | Tour starts at IISG |
Wednesday 4 March 2026 Conference Day 1
| Time | Venue | |
| 08.30 – 10.00 | Registration and coffee | Vide & entry hall |
| 09.00 – 10.00 | Getting to know GLOBALISE sessions 1-3 | Parallel rooms |
| 10.15 – 10.30 | Short welcome | Vide |
| 10.30 – 12.00 | Parallel session 1 | Parallel rooms |
| 12.00 – 13.00 | Lunch | Max Nettlau/Vide |
| 13.00 – 14.00 | Keynote Lecture 1: Matthias van Rossum | Max Nettlau |
| 14.00 – 14.45 | GLOBALISE project update | Max Nettlau |
| 14.45 – 15.00 | Short break | Vide |
| 15.00 – 16.30 | Parallel session 2 | Parallel rooms |
| 16.30 – 16.45 | Short break | Vide |
| 16.45 – 17.00 | Short reflection on Day 1 | Max Nettlau |
| 17.00 – 18.00 | Roundtable 1: Global Histories and the Digital Turn | Max Nettlau |
| 18.00 – 18.30 | Performance lecture by TogetherTogether: Acero, Catani & Gaspar. Farewell: An Imagined Response to Dutch Colonizers. | Meeting point: Vide |
| 18.00 – 18.45 | Drinks | Max Nettlau |
Thursday 5 March 2026 Conference Day 2
| Time | Venue | |
| 09.00 – 10.45 | Parallel session 3 | Parallel rooms |
| 10.45 – 11.00 | Short break | Vide |
| 11.00 – 12.00 | Keynote Lecture 2: Ann Stoler. ON BEARING ARCHIVAL TRUTHS THEIR BURDENS OF COLONIAL PROOF | Max Nettlau |
| 12.00 – 13.00 | Lunch | Max Nettlau/Vide |
| 12.30 – 13.00 | Performance lecture by Roelof Petrus van Wyk. AN UNNATURAL HISTORY: Fugitive Queer Desire under VOC Capitalist Erasure, made legible with Artistic Research methods by excavating the Sodomy Criminal Case records in the Colonial VOC Archive, Cape Town, 1652-1795. | Max Nettlau |
| 12.30 – 13.00 | Performance lecture by Carmen Draxler. »Mother-of-Oil« Colonial roots of the oil company Shell in Indonesia. | Meeting point: registration desk |
| 13.00 – 14.30 | Parallel session 4 | Parallel rooms |
| 14.30 – 15.00 | Coffee break | Vide |
| 14.30 – 15.00 | Performance lecture by Carmen Draxler. »Mother-of-Oil« Colonial roots of the oil company Shell in Indonesia. | Meeting point: registration desk |
| 15.00 – 16.45 | Parallel session 5 | Parallel rooms |
| 16.45 – 17.00 | Short break | Vide |
| 17.00 – 17.15 | Short reflection on Day 2 | Max Nettlau |
| 17.15 – 18.30 | Roundtable 2: Decolonizing Infrastructure, Engaging Communities | Max Nettlau |
| 18.30 | Conference dinner * | External venue tbc |
*Conference dinner is for speakers and invited guests only.
Friday 6 March 2026 Conference Day 3
| Time | Venue | |
| 09.00 – 10.45 | Parallel session 6 | Parallel rooms |
| 10.45 – 11.00 | Short break | Vide |
| 11.00 – 12.00 | Keynote Lecture 3: Tonio Andrade. The Art and Peril of Being in Between: Reflections on Cultural Brokers and the Dutch East India Company | Max Nettlau |
| 12.00 – 13.30 | Closing Roundtable and Plenary Reflection: Colonial Pasts, Empowering Futures | Max Nettlau |
| 13.30 – 14.30 | Lunch | Max Nettlau/Vide |
Session 1: Wed 4 March 10.30 – 12.00
| Session 1A: Material Culture and Social Life Nikolaevsky room |
Session 1B: Mobilities Max Nettlau room |
Session 1C: Digital Humanities Approaches to the VOC Archive Posthumus room |
| Josephine Koopman – Unboxing the VOC Archives: on the material culture of betel chewing Isabelle Stone – Collecting Shells at a Cost: Johan Nieuhof’s Account of the Pearl Fishery at Toothukudi, 1664-1665. Lodewijk Wagenaar – Character and remains of the VOC colony of Ceylon. An internet search. |
Roni Tabroni – The Nusantara Hajj Pilgrimage in the 17th and 18th centuries: The Emergence of a Global Ummah Identity. Nikhil Bellarykar – Maratha overseas trade in the 17th century– tracing the ship Shambhu Prasad through the VOC archives. Tom Hoogervorst – Globalise and Unlocked Food Archives. |
Willemien de Kock, Rob Lenders and Emin Tatar – Tracing Historical Tortoiseshell Exploitation and Trade through AI-Driven Analysis. Andre Valdestilhas, Shuai Wang and Angelica Maineri – Aggregating the FAIR Assessment Results of Datasets by the GLOBALISE Community for Evaluating FAIR Data Management. |
Session 2: Wed 4 March 15.00 – 16.30
| Session 2A: The Dutch Reformed Church and Colonialism Nikolaevsky room |
Session 2B: Trade, Colonial Expansion and Glocal Networks Max Nettlau room |
Session 2C: Currencies, Politics and Labour Posthumus room |
| Jon Kuiper – The Dutch Reformed Church on Ambon (1605-1700): Creating Power Structures and Framing the Other. Yudha Thianto – The VOC, the Church, and the Massacre of Banda in 1621. Fred van Lieburg – A New Biographical Dictionary of Netherlands Indian Ministers, Sick-comforters and Missionaries 1600-1960. |
Luc Bulten – In the Empire’s Eclipse: The Intersection of Intra-Asian Entrepreneurial Networks and Dutch-Colonial Institutions in Eighteenth Century Melaka. Marsely Kehoe – Exploring Global Textile Circulation with the Dutch Textile Trade Project. Ajay Joy Mathew – Between the Cartaz and the Zeebrief: The Zamorin’s Maritime Diplomacy, 1633-1766. |
Nurman Kholis – “Duit” and “Dirham”: A Preliminary Study on The Arabic Scripts in VOC-Dutch East India Coins in Java in 18th and 19th Centuries. Maarten Draper – The Travails of Paper Currency in the Dutch Indian Ocean, 1780-1825. Jan Lucassen |
Session 3: Thu 5 March 09.00 – 10.45
| Session 3A: Mediators, Knowledge and Contestation Nikolaevsky room |
Session 3B: Global-Micro Histories and Colonial Structure Max Nettlau room |
Session 3C: (Re)Connecting Histories – VOC, Atlantic and Iberian empires Posthumus room |
| Michael C. Reidy – The Role of Malagasy Intermediaries in the Contestation of VOC Power During the Company’s Slave Trading Voyages in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Indian Ocean. Xianting Huang – Circulation of Camphor in the VOC World: Trade, Knowledge and Representation in Networks. Romée van Oostenbrugge – At the Margins of European Knowledge: Local Guides’ Contributions to VOC Navigation During the Eighteenth Century. Maarten Manse – Recasting the Terms of Empire: Indigenous Translators and Scribes in the VOC Archives, and how they mediated the legal vocabulary through Treaty Making in Southeast Asia. |
Byapti Sur – Local Lives, Global Stories: Studying the VOC Factories in Bengal, 1600-1800. Rivindu de Zoysa – Carel de Mirando: A Microhistory of the Service of an Administrative Official in Dutch Ceylon. Ann Heylen – Women in the VOC Archive: Patriarchy and Presence in Dutch Formosa. Rosalie Oudshoorn – Succession, adoption, and power: Ranis in Malabar during the Dutch period. |
Guido van Meersbergen – Tracing Diplomatic Intermediaries in the VOC archives. Zhonghua Du – Planting Addictions: Opium Trade and the Colonial Expansion of the VOC in Asia. Nicholas C. Sy – The Asian Enslaved at the Intersections between European Archives, ca. 1663. Hélder Carvahal – Globalise and Trans-imperial Labour in the Early Modern Indian Ocean: Reflections from the Colonial Portuguese Rule. |
Session 4: Thu 5 March 13.00 – 14.30
| Session 4A: Memory, Culture and the Archive Nikolaevsky room |
Session 4B: Local Diversities and Colonial Tensions Max Nettlau room |
Session 4C: Commodity Frontiers, Environment and Resistance Posthumus room |
| Dondy Pepito Ramos – From Archives to Artefacts: Negotiating VOC Cultural Memories in Australia through the Dutch Shipwreck Artefacts. Nelo A. Schmalen – Decentering Colonial Histories through the City as an Archive. Poorvi Prabhakar Garag – Unravelling Lifeworlds: Farmers and Consumers of Black Pepper. |
Lap Kan Au – The Two Fates of Plural Societies Reconsidered: Actor-Centered Performative Reproduction of VOC Plakkaaten in Seventeenth-Century Cape and Formosa. Benjamin J.Q. Khoo – Murder in the Plantations: The Chinese Civil War on Riau (1786-92). Lija Mary Kambakkaran Joseph – Mapping the Everyday Lives of a Subaltern Community: The Mukkuvas of Malabar in the VOC Archives. |
Jens Aurich Linu Danielkutty – Spice Routes to Scarred Landscapes: How Dutch Colonial Corporation reshaped world landscapes |
Session 5: Thu 5 March 15.00 – 16.45
| Session 5A: Material Culture, Knowledge and Circulations Nikolaevsky room |
Session 5B: Colonial Exploitation: Land and People Max Nettlau room |
Session 5C: Science, Environment, and Colonial Histories Posthumus room |
| Dung Pham – Symbolic ‘adoption’ of VOC merchants: a diplomatic practice of seventeenth-century Vietnamese rulers. Ziquan Zhou – Sappanwood for the King’s Debt: Material and the Struggling Cooperation between the VOC and the Siamese Court in the Early Eighteenth Century. Philipp Huber – All Political Power comes from the Barrel of a Gun: Arms Trading, Gun Control, and Revolt in Ayutthaya, 1656-1709. |
Wenrui Zhao – A Female Alchemist and VOC’s Mining Venture in Seventeenth-Century Sumatra. Sandunika Hasangani – The Politics of Healing: Medicine, Biopolitics, and the Dutch East India Company in Sri Lanka. Kate Ekama and Eva Marie Lehner – Slavery and Dis/Ability: Case Studies from the Cape Colony. Britt van Duijvenvoorde – Mobilizing against mobilization: resistance against commercial enslavement in Arakan, Coromandel, and Malabar. |
Aparijita Das – Unsmooth Sailing in Swalley: The VOC’s Hydrographies of Local Waterscapes in the Indian Ocean World. Anna Bruins – No (Hu)man is an Island: The Construction of Nature in Sources from Dutch Mauritius (1598-1710). Pichayapat Naisupap – Through the Life of Chillie, a Female Hunting Elephant: Uncovering the Glocal World of the ‘Underclass’ Elephants in Dutch Ceylon. Linda Robertus – Severe and scorching fevers: a study of eighteenth-century ship surgeons’ journals. |
Session 6: Fri 6 March 09.00 – 10.45
| Session 6A: Language and Knowledge Circulation Nikolaevsky room |
Session 6B: Oceans of Data: New Horizons Max Nettlau room |
Session 6C: Recentering Histories and Archives Posthumus room |
| Anna Pytlowany – Linguistic Borrowings and Digital Archives: Re-reading Ketelaar’s VOC Records. Anjana Aby – Collecting Information- The Dutch in Malabar. Philip Post – Tracing Intertextual Colonial Legitimacy: The Memoranda of Transfer in the VOC Archives of the Moluccas, 1750–1800. Kay Pepping – How the VOC Wrote Home: Mapping Parallel Information Flows in the OBP Corpus. |
Andre Murteira – Portuguese Ships lost to Dutch Privateering in Asia: Building a Dataset. Pascal Konings and Britt van Duijvenvoorde – ‘[We] cannot exist properly without slaves’: New Insights into Early Dutch Slave Trade in Asia from ESTA Database, 1621-1660. Brecht Nijman – Testing the Waters: Reconstructing intra-Asian maritime trade networks in the 18 th century, a proof of concept. |
Leonard Blussé – Decentering the History of the VOC in East Asia 1600-1662. Renu Elizabeth Abraham – Dutch Registers of the Perumal Tradition from Malabar. Pouwel van Schooten – Forgotten in the Archive, Remembered in Reality: Memories of Slave Descent in 18th century Galle, Sri Lanka. Erik Odegard – Sing Alap Alap’s Men: Tracing the VOC’s Asian Soldiers |
This program was last updated on Tuesday, 3 February 2026.
Further details about registration will be published soon. Stay tuned for more updates!
We look forward to welcoming you to Amsterdam in March 2026.
