databases

Bringing the history of early globalisation and colonialism at the fingertips of researchers and the wider public. Consisting of approximately twenty-five million pages, the UNESCO Memory of the World-listed archives of the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, VOC) offer a unique view on interactions between European and non-European actors in Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  GLOBALISE unlocks the so-called ‘Overgekomen Brieven en Papieren’ (‘Letters and papers received’, OBP), the key series of VOC documents and reports that were sent over from the company’s Asian headquarters in Batavia (now Jakarta in Indonesia) to the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This series of more than 5 million handwritten pages is of crucial importance to our understanding of the history of the world. It provides detailed and structured overviews of historical events and social, political, and economic developments occurring in the vast region where the VOC was active.

Globalise