Digitation project answers questions about Dutch colonial trade in minutes
A VOC bond from 1632
Dutch historians have been awarded a €3.8m grant to digitise a large part of the 25 million surviving handwritten documents from the business administration of the Dutch East Indies (VOC) company.
The aim of the project, dubbed ‘Globalise’, is to not only to make the information accessible to historians and others across the globe but to present them with the answers to their questions in minutes, albeit in 17
th or 18
th century Dutch.
The most important documents, the General Missives, which contain summaries of the reports made by VOC officials to their Dutch masters, are kept at the national archive in The Hague and have long since been published in book form. These comprise 200,000 documents which have been partly digitised but are not easy to navigate.