A Gazetteer for the Dutch East India Company Archives: The GLOBALISE Places Dataset
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…
Call for Papers: GLOBALISE Conference
Colonial Pasts, New Approaches and Historiographical Futures: Explorations of GLOBALISE, the Dutch East India Company Archives and the writing of new histories. Date: 4-6 March 2026 Location: International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam
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Introduction The Dutch East India Company (VOC) records are in the Nationaal Archief Den Haag, under the number 1.04.02. These trading company records span two centuries and cover a wide…
Incognito Royalty on the Princes Roijael
This blogpost contains references to methods of punishment that users might find disturbing. The Dutch East India Company (VOC) established and controlled numerous trading posts (factories) across maritime Asia, one…
Closeness at a Distance? The Port Town Paradox
Marc Widmer has recently graduated from the Free University of Berlin and the Humboldt University of Berlin with a master’s degree in Global History. His studies focus on urban history,…
Textile Taxonomies – GLOBALISE’s efforts in defining traded textiles in the Indian Ocean Region
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). This blog post tells about the efforts of the GLOBALISE project to create a thesaurus of textiles that helps researchers find their way in the VOC archives
Aligning GLOBALISE with Researchers’ Needs
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…
Rediscovering Early Modern Polities: First Thoughts on Dataset Creation
Update: we published a first version of the Polities dataset in July 2024. https://hdl.handle.net/10622/SOS0KC You have been pouring over the archives for weeks together in search of precious information on…
Looking back on a successful kickoff meeting
On 11 May 2022, the International Institute of Social History hosted the GLOBALISE kickoff for those associated with the project as board and steering committee members and interested researchers and…