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.
Conference venue (map):
International Institute of Social History
Cruquiusweg 31
1019 AT Amsterdam
Conference Registration
We have very limited availability for in-person attendance due to venue capacity. To join the waiting list to attend in person if spaces become available, please fill out this form.
To join us online only for the conference, sign up on Eventbrite.
Conference Schedule
Note: This program is continually being updated and may still be 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 | Walking tour | 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: 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 |
| 15.00 – 16.30 | Workshop: Outsmarting the Machine | Souvarine |
| 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: registration desk |
| 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: Ann Laura 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, A Performance Lecture. Fugitive 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 |
| 13.30 – 14.00 | Performance lecture by Carmen Draxler. »Mother-of-Oil« Colonial roots of the oil company Shell in Indonesia. | Meeting point: registration desk |
| 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 |
| 09.00 – 10.30 | Workshop: Outsmarting the Machine | Souvarine |
| 10.45 – 11.00 | Short break | Vide |
| 11.00 – 12.00 | Keynote Lecture: 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 |
Keynote Lectures
Ann Laura Stoler, The New School for Social Research
ON BEARING ARCHIVAL TRUTHS
THEIR BURDENS OF COLONIAL PROOF
This reflection derives from decades working on the politics of truth in shaping imperial governance and its hierarchies of credibility, as manifest in Dutch and French colonial contexts of the late 19th and early 20th century. It’s a project that asks how those who govern know what they know, how arbitrators of truth imagine how they know, what constitutes evidence of what they profess to know, and what they claim as proof when what they profess to know, they do not.
If the archival documents are, as the luminous French feminist historian Arlette Farge once argued, “a tear in the fabric of time, an unplanned glimpse offered into an unexpected event,” they are indeed as much a tear in the fiction of reason, often in collision with the regimes of truth that dictate causal arrows and linear sequence, closer to how Foucault defined an event, as a breach of the self-evident and common sense.
In this reflection, I call upon a set of scenes where “proof” and “truth” put demands on what is known, by whom, how and in what way. In pursuing micro-fissures in the edifice of imperial rule, I turn to sense and sensibility, to the texture of the detail shaping what we think we know of imperial formations past and present, and among those with resurgent and recursive durabilities today.
Ann Laura Stoler is Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Historical Studies and Anthropology at The New School for Social Research where she is founding director of The Institute for Critical Social Inquiry and founding co-editor of journal, Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon. Her work on the politics of archives, imperial debris, a colonial reading of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, on grammars of time, and the politics of sentiment have been guided by an effort to understand and confront the hypervisibility and invisibility of infrastructures of inequality. Her books include Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (2009), and Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt, 1870–1979 (1985; 1995), Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (1995), as well as the edited volumes Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (with Frederick Cooper, 1997) and Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination (2013).
Tonio Andrade, Emory University
The Art and Peril of Being in Between: Reflections on Cultural Brokers and the Dutch East India Company
Scholars have long recognized the Dutch East India Company’s dependence on local translators and cultural mediators. In this talk I plan to discuss three such figures who were active between 1633 and 1674: Krotoa Eva of the Cape of Good Hope, Osoet Pegua of Ayutthaya (Siam), and He Bin of Taiwan. Although they worked in vastly different contexts and faced unique challenges, their lives followed similar trajectories. Each rose to influence through linguistic and cultural skills that enabled them to mediate between Company officials and local populations. Each cultivated personal ties with Company officials that bypassed formal oversight. Each used these connections to accumulate wealth and influence, skillfully navigating internal fissures within both Company administration and local society. And each got into trouble with the Company on one hand and local groups on the other. This trouble generated documents – legal proceedings, seized letters, interrogations, and reports – that open a window onto the Company’s messy realities on the ground, reminding us of the importance of personal networks, unofficial dealings, and intimate relations to the entangled histories of the VOC and the societies it operated within.
Tonio Andrade (B.A., Reed College, 1992; M.A., University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 1994; M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D., Yale University, 1997, 1998, and 2000) is a Professor of Chinese and Global History at Emory University. His major books include The Last Embassy: The Dutch Mission of 1795 and the Forgotten History of Western Encounters with China (Princeton, 2021), The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History (Princeton, 2016), Lost Colony: The Untold Story of Europe’s First War with China (Princeton, 2011), and How Taiwan Became Chinese (Columbia University Press, 2007). He is author of more than thirty articles, which have appeared in such journals as The Journal of World History, Late Imperial China, Itinerario, and Journal of Asian Studies, among others. Honors include The John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, The N.E.H. Public Scholars Fellowship, The Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellowship, and the American Historical Association’s Gutenberg-e Prize. He lives in Decatur, Georgia, with his family and enjoys advocating for safe and sustainable transportation.
Roundtables
Roundtable 1: Global Histories and the Digital Turn
Wed 4 March 17.00 – 18.00
Max Nettlau
Chair: Guido van Meersbergen, Warwick University and Journal of Global History
Speakers:
Dagmar Freist, Carl-von-Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Prize Papers Project
Ana Sofia Ribeiro, Universidade de Évora, MONSOON project
Claude Chevaleyre, ENS de Lyon, China Human Trafficking and Slaving Database
How can large archival, data and research projects reshape the practice and impact of global history writing?
This roundtable brings together leading scholars with related initiatives to the GLOBALISE project to discuss how these initiatives can fuel the field of global history through the accessibility of sources, the development of new research methods, and more.
Roundtable 2: Decolonizing Infrastructure, Engaging Communities
Thu 5 March 17.15 – 18.30
Max Nettlau / hybrid session
Chair: Wim Manuhutu, VU Amsterdam
Speakers:
Asawari Luthra, historian and anthropologist, GLOBALISE guest researcher
Yus Broersma, heritage practitioner and researcher
Wisaal Abrahams, visual artist
Charles Jeurgens, University of Amsterdam
Dutch Trading Post Heritage Network
This roundtable invites speakers to provide perspectives on working with communities, whether in cultural heritage, community engagement or archival practices. Together, we reflect on how archival infrastructures affect access to colonial archives, past and present. What does increased digital accessibility mean for communities with a stake in colonial archives? How might digital infrastructures move more meaningfully towards practices of care?
Plenary Discussion and Closing Roundtable: Colonial Pasts, Empowering Futures
Fri 6 March 13.00 – 14.30
Max Nettlau
Chair: Lodewijk Petram, project manager GLOBALISE
Speakers:
Matthias van Rossum, project leader GLOBALISE
Lija Joseph, Leiden University
Anna Bruins, University of Warwick
Wenrui Zhao, University of Utah
Luc Bulten, Radboud University, Nijmegen
How is digitization transforming the kinds of questions we can ask of colonial archives? What new research directions seem most urgent or promising after this conference, and what missing perspectives have become visible?
During this conference, speakers will have explored diverse ways to interpret and write new histories using the archives of the Dutch East India Company and beyond. The key themes of this conference include: the VOC archives and history writing, the VOC as a colonial power, decentering histories of the VOC, as well as digital approaches to colonial archives. In this closing roundtable, we envision an open discussion between panelists and conference attendees, inviting you to share your insights and to reflect collectively on how global history writing can move forward.
Overview of Sessions
Session 1: Wed 4 March 10.30 – 12.00
| Session 1A: Material Culture and Social Life Nikolaevsky room Chair: Tristan Mostert |
Session 1B: Mobilities Max Nettlau room Chair: Marieke Hendriksen |
Session 1C: Digital Humanities Approaches to the VOC Archive Posthumus room Chair: Stella Verkijk |
| 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, Ronald Siebes 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 Chair: Dienke Hondius |
Session 2B: Trade, Colonial Expansion and Glocal Networks Max Nettlau room Chair: Erik Odegard |
Session 2C: Currencies, Politics and Labour Posthumus room Chair: Maarten Manse |
| 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 – The Making of Colombo: Dutch and Lankan Engineering, Infrastructures and Commodity Trade, 1745-1795. 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 – The deep monetization of India and changing labour relations 1500-1900. |
Session 3: Thu 5 March 09.00 – 10.45
| Session 3A: Mediators, Knowledge and Contestation Nikolaevsky room Chair: Jos Gommans |
Session 3B: Global-Micro Histories and Colonial Structure Max Nettlau room Chair: Nira Wickramasinghe |
Session 3C: (Re)Connecting Histories – VOC, Atlantic and Iberian empires Posthumus room Chair: Pepijn Brandon |
| 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. Huang Xianting – 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. |
Session 4: Thu 5 March 13.00 – 14.30
| Session 4A: Memory, Culture and the Archive Nikolaevsky room Chair: Lotte Baltussen |
Session 4B: Local Diversities and Colonial Tensions Max Nettlau room Chair: Kathryn Wellen |
Session 4C: Commodity Frontiers, Environment and Resistance Posthumus room Chair: Catia Antunes |
| 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 – By All Means Necessary: The Organization of Indigo Production and Resistance under the VOC. Linu Danielkutty – Spice Routes to Scarred Landscapes: How Dutch Colonial Corporation reshaped world landscapes. Kathleen Burke – Trans-imperial Travels: The Quest to Commodify Cacao in Island Southeast Asia |
Session 5: Thu 5 March 15.00 – 16.45
| Session 5A: Material Culture, Knowledge and Circulations Nikolaevsky room Chair: Alicia Schrikker |
Session 5B: Colonial Exploitation: Land and People Max Nettlau room Chair: Joris van den Tol |
Session 5C: Science, Environment, and Colonial Histories Posthumus room Chair: Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen |
| Pham Thuy Dung – Symbolic Adoption of Dutch East India Company Merchants: Two Cases from Seventeenth-Century Vietnam. 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 Chair: Gijsbert Rutten |
Session 6B: Oceans of Data: New Horizons Max Nettlau room Chair: Hélder Carvahal |
Session 6C: Recentering Histories and Archives Posthumus room Chair: Filipa Ribeiro da Silva |
| 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. |
André 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 18th century, a proof of concept. Bethany Warner – Unlocking European Colonial Archives: Open-Source Approaches to HTR and Colonial Archives. |
Leonard Blussé – Collateral History: The VOC in China and Japan, 1602–1662. 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 Soldiers: Madurese Infantry in Company Service, 1761-1768. |
Workshop Sessions
Getting to Know GLOBALISE 1: Transcriptions and Accessing the Archives
Tue 3 March 13.15 – 14.15
Tue 3 March 14.30 – 15.30
Wed 4 March 09.00 – 10.00
These are repeat sessions. The contents of each workshop session will be the same.
Workshop instructors: Bethany Warner, Lodewijk Petram
In this session, we present the path to the GLOBALISE transcriptions, from scans to searchable text, and demonstrate a number of methods for using the transcriptions, even if you cannot easily read early modern Dutch.
The project utilised the open-source handwritten text recognition tool Loghi to transcribe 5 million scans of the VOC archives. In this session, we first introduce Loghi and the transcription pipeline, followed by a set of tools that are currently under development to help users explore and interpret the resulting texts. These include AI-assisted search, named entity recognition, glossing, and related methods. Together, these approaches make the VOC archives more accessible and interpretable, especially for users with limited knowledge of (early modern) Dutch. Many of these tools will be integrated into the research portal, scheduled for release in the last quarter of 2026.
This session will be partially interactive, giving participants the opportunity to experiment with some of the tools in development for navigating the GLOBALISE collections. Please bring a laptop!
Getting to Know GLOBALISE 2: Annotations and Entity & Event Recognition
Tue 3 March 13.15 – 14.15
Tue 3 March 14.30 – 15.30
Wed 4 March 09.00 – 10.00
These are repeat sessions. The contents of each workshop session will be the same.
Workshop instructors: Stella Verkijk, Sophie Arnoult
This session will present the work performed in Globalise around Entity and Event recognition. As Natural Language Processing tasks, both Entity and Event recognition share methodology, but they differ in the level of linguistic or world knowledge involved in executing them.
We start the session with a general introduction of the ideas behind using Natural Language Processing (NLP) for information extraction within Globalise. We explain how NLP can help turn text into conceptually grouped information. We then focus our attention on Entity and Event recognition specifically, which are types of NLP tasks. We introduce the task design: how were both tasks conceptualized and which method type was chosen for each?
Both tasks rely on annotated data for training models. We will describe the annotation process, from developing guidelines to data curation.
Having a baseline model and gold data is not enough. Model development involves experimenting with many possible settings and parameters against a methodologically-sound setup. We will explain how data splits and experiment tracking are used for different stages of development.
Finally, we go into why the outputs of our models are helpful for historical research by showing some examples of event detection.
Stella Verkijk is a PhD Candidate at the Huygens Institute and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam investigating how to perform Event Reconstruction in the archives of the VOC with language technology. She specializes in domain-specific language modelling.
Sophie Arnoult is a computational linguist and postdoc researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She is responsible for Named Entity recognition and disambiguation within Globalise.
Getting to Know GLOBALISE 3: Historical Data and Research
These workshops sessions will all introduce participants to historical data and research, but led by different instructors, each will share their own expertise with different datasets.
Tue 3 March 13.15 – 14.15
Workshop led by Kay Pepping (Focus on persons dataset)
The VOC archives can feel like a sea of words without contextual information about the people mentioned in the records. This session introduces the key concepts behind the GLOBALISE Persons dataset and explores how person-based contextualization can support searching, interpretation, and research in the archive. No technical skills required!
Participants will work with established reference data to identify people in VOC transcriptions and link them to archival texts, thereby reflecting on how new knowledge can be generated from existing data. The session will conclude with a discussion of the challenges of identifying historical persons and a critical reflection on whose lives and experiences remain difficult (or impossible) to research using currently available reference data.
Tue 3 March 14.30 – 15.30
Workshop led by Brecht Nijman
The VOC archives are only a sea of words if you don’t know what you are reading. But what if we can change that by giving users some information about places, people or ships that are written about in the archive? How can this contextual information transform the way in which we comprehend the archive and its contents?
This presentation will focus on an important facet of the project – historical contextualization. It will emphasize on how providing additional information about certain types of entities can be a useful aid for searching and researching the archive. This presentation will specifically introduce datasets of the GLOBALISE project.
Wed 4 March 09.00 – 10.00
Workshop led by Dung Pham, Nikhil Bellarykar, and Manjusha Kuruppath (Focus on places dataset).
The VOC archives are only a sea of words if you don’t know what you are reading. But what if we can change that by giving users some information about places, people or ships that are written about in the archive? How can this contextual information transform the way in which we comprehend the archive and its contents?
This presentation will focus on an important facet of the project – historical contextualization. It will emphasize on how providing additional information about certain types of entities can be a useful aid for searching and researching the archive. This presentation will specifically introduce the PLACES dataset of the GLOBALISE project, discuss its various facets and speak about how and why it was created. The second part of the presentation will comprise a hands-on session. Here, participants will have the opportunity to work closely with the dataset to learn how it can assist them explore and interpret the archive more effectively.
Outsmarting the Machine: Critically Evaluating Automatic Data Enrichments in Text
Wed 4 March 15.00 – 16.30 (this takes place at the same time as Session 2).
Fri 6 March 09.00 – 10.30 (this takes place at the same time as Session 6). UPDATE 13 FEB: FRIDAY SESSION IS NOW FULLY BOOKED.
These are repeat sessions. The contents of each workshop session will be the same.
Maximum 10 participants per session.
The language of instruction will be English, but to attend this workshop you should be able to read (Early Modern) Dutch and understand the historical context of the archives. You should also bring a laptop.
Text annotations made by Machine Learning systems are becoming a widespread aspect of historical research. But how can researchers with no experience or training in Machine Learning judge their output? In this workshop you will learn how.
Labelling entities in a text is an established method of enriching historical sources with language technology. More cutting-edge technology can also label things that happen, such as ships leaving, conflicts being started, relationships changing, and islands being invaded. This is the type of technology we will be focusing on.
The workshop consists of two parts. We start with a short theoretical part, offering an introduction on the inner workings of language technology based on deep neural networks. We then go into the practical part, where we will be evaluating a system’s output, analysing a Missive sent from Batavia in 1782 about the English conquering territory in Trinkonomale.
This workshop is hosted by Stella Verkijk, PhD candidate in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning developer at GLOBALISE.
Performance Lectures
TogetherTogether – Juliana Acero, Stefano Cattani and Rita Gaspar
Farewell: An Imagined Response to Dutch Colonizers
Wed 4 March, 18.00 – 18.30.
Meeting point: Registration desk. A GLOBALISE team member will lead you to the performance venue.
Maximum 30 participants due to venue capacity.
UPDATE 13 FEB: THIS PERFORMANCE IS FULLY BOOKED.
This research-based performance departs from the seventeenth-century archives of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). The work is an artistic translation of our research into cultural, spiritual, and epistemic dispossession in the territory now called Indonesia. We depart from the reports of tree extirpations in the Maluku Islands, and on the life of the botanist and merchant Georg Eberhard Rumphius, as an example of the Company’s
domination attempt of the spice trade, knowledge authorship, and the imposition of violent systems of abduction upon people and territories.
As research-based artists, we are not aiming to solve History, instead, we pose questions about how we perceive and engage with it. How does reproducing archival information enable us to build historical solidarity without re-victimizing and reinforcing colonial narratives? Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s method of critical fabulation, we embody the voices of the soil, the plants, and the sun, disrupting the extractive colonial gaze, and
highlighting perspectives of the more-than-human victims of colonial labour regimes. By doing so, we strive to demonstrate how performance can offer alternative modes of engaging with the colonial archive that foreground affect, relationality, and accountability, and expand decolonial methodologies in the humanities and social sciences.
TogetherTogether – Juliana Acero, Stefano Cattani and Rita Gaspar
TogetherTogether is a research-based artistic collective bringing gatherings, workshops, interventions and performances into both institutional and non-institutional contexts.
Juliana Acero Castellanos is a communication designer, embodied storyteller, and maker with a deep conviction for social design. Her practice explores narratives as spaces for emotional and political reflection.
Stefano Cattani is a research-based visual and performance artist. His work, rooted in queerness, investigates the intersection of body, identity and space.
Rita Gaspar is a designer, storyteller, and activist. Her work explores resistance, collectivity, and borders through writing, movement, disruptive gestures and intimate spaces.
Carmen Draxler
»Mother-of-Oil« Colonial roots of the oil company Shell in Indonesia.
Thu 5 March
Session 1: 12.30 – 13.00
Session 2: 13:30 – 14:00 (Note: this timeslot is in parallel to Panel Session 4).
Session 3: 14.30 – 15.00
These are repeat sessions. Maximum 10 participants each session due to venue capacity.
UPDATE 13 FEB: ALL SESSIONS ARE FULLY BOOKED.
Meeting point: Registration desk.
A GLOBALISE team member will lead you to the performance venue. This event will take place in an enclosed dark space, please do not sign up if you may experience discomfort.
»Mother-of-Oil« is an archival research project that traces the colonial roots of the Dutch-British oil company Shell in Indonesia. By following the stories of seashells from the Indo-Pacific, the research unfolds as a relational map of archival material that reveals Shell’s entanglement with the Dutch East India Company (VOC).
Like tulips, seashells were highly coveted commodities in the 17th century that captivated many wealthy Europeans and became a symbol of power and prestige—a symbol that is the distinctive trademark of the global oil empire today. Before extracting oil, Shell’s predecessors sold trinket boxes adorned with seashells from the Indo-Pacific Ocean.
Through layering visual evidence from the collections of the National Archive, the Shell Historical Heritage Archive, and the Rijksmuseum, a counternarrative that disrupts the company’s official account becomes evident. Presented as lecture performance, the story highlights how the commodification of marine life through colonial practices became a template for fossil capitalism, and emphasizes the urgency to recognize that decarbonisation requires challenging colonial continuities as seashells are important to mitigate climate change.
Carmen Draxler is a visual researcher and designer. She researches the alienating causes and conditions of the Anthropocene and critically investigates the social impacts of oil infrastructure through archival and anthropological methods as well as material experimentation and lecture as performance practice. With a background in visual com- munication, she designs visual storytelling figures that escape dominant narratives in order to contribute to the discourse of climate justice and collective repair.
Roelof Petrus van Wyk
AN UNNATURAL HISTORY, A Performance Lecture.
Fugitive 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.
Thu 5 March, 18.00 – 18.30
Location: Max Nettlau
An Unnatural History is a performance lecture that excavates fugitive same-sex desire from the sodomy trial records of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) archive at the Cape of Good Hope (1652–1795). Drawing on over 200 criminal case files, the work engages archival fragments produced through surveillance, interrogation, and punishment, reading them not only as instruments of colonial control but as inadvertent repositories of affective and social bonds. These records, intended to erase, paradoxically preserve traces of a same-sex subculture operating within the interstices of early modern colonial capitalism.
Positioned as a queer artistic researcher and thirteenth-generation descendant of Dutch settlers, I approach the VOC archive as a haunted site, engaging in an embodied practice of voicing queer ancestral kin. Through poetic text, sound, and visual composition, the performance translates across languages and registers, activating the non-linear temporality of queer life through fragments of testimony and witness.
Artistic research functions here as a critical method that reanimates spectral intimacies and enables speculative reconstructions of social worlds the colonial courts sought to obliterate. By shifting homosocial traces in legal records toward the homoerotic, the work queers the colonial narrative and opens affective circuits between past and present. This approach lays the groundwork for a broader thesis on capitalism’s contradictory role in both producing and suppressing same-sex cultures of desire, contributing to an understanding of queer counterpublic formation within colonial modernity.
Roelof Petrus van Wyk is a queer South African artist, architect, researcher, and curator whose interdisciplinary practice explores the entanglements of visual culture, archives, desire, and power. Trained in architecture and visual culture (Goldsmiths/ London), with a PhD in Curatorial, Public and Visual Cultures (WITS/Johannesburg), his work spans photography, performance, sound, installation, and artistic research methodologies. Engaging colonial and modern archives as sensorial, affective fields, he develops counter-histories that foreground repressed and marginalised narratives, particularly around sexuality and capitalism. Van Wyk has exhibited and performed internationally, curated major platforms including the Johannesburg Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and is currently an Artistic Research Fellow at Stellenbosch University, where he investigates queer counter publics and archival memory.
Dutch East India Company in Amsterdam Walk, led by Rizky Kalebos
Tue 3 March, 15.30 – 17.00
Duration: 1.5 hours
Distance to walk: about 4.5 km.
Meeting point: IISG main entrance.
Maximum 20 participants. UPDATE 9 FEB: THIS TOUR IS FULLY BOOKED. THERE IS ALREADY A WAITING LIST.
In this walk through the former harbour of Amsterdam, Rizky will elaborate on the history of the area and the legacy of colonialism on the urban fabric of the city. Even though the remnants of the former shipping wharf of the Dutch East India Company are few, the size of the area is still significant within the city center. By looking through a geographical lens, the walk explores how global trade has shaped the city.
The walk will start from the conference location, continuing through the former VOC wharf, along locations that reflect on the past such as the replica VOC ship, Scheepvaarthuis and Schreierstoren. These landmarks from different periods show how imagery around the VOC has developed and is still being shaped. The walk will end at the former headquarters of the VOC, now the UvA.
Rizky Kalebos (1995) is a city planner from the Netherlands with roots in Indonesia, who researches the legacy of colonialism in both the Netherlands and Indonesia in cities, architecture, language and food. In Amsterdam and Den Haag he organizes walking tours through the city centers showing buildings, sculptures and artworks connected to Indonesia and how the country shaped these cities.
This conference program was last updated on Friday, 13 February 2026. If you notice any errors, please kindly get in touch with the conference team. For any questions, you may reach us through our contact form.
