Millions of archived VOC documents now searchable online, including slavery records

From Wednesday, five million scanned documents from the archives of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) will be digitally searchable at the click of a button thanks to a text recognition project by the Huygens Institute and various partners. The GLOBALISE project makes the information in these documents on topics like enslavement and colonial violence much easier to search and read, the Huygens Institute said on Tuesday.

The documents involved are known as the Transmitted Letters and Papers. They’re from the VOC archives, which have been recognized as UNESCO World Memory since 2003 and contain detailed information about the actions of the VOC in the 17th and 18th centuries. According to the Huygens Institute, these documents bear witness to Dutch colonial history.

The text recognition will lead to new perspectives on the colonial past, project leader Matthias van Rossum said. “The searchability means that information in the archives can be found much more complete and faster. For example, the consequences of the terrible depopulation of the island of Liuqiu near Taiwan by the VOC in 1636 can be found at the click of a button. We know that the VOC was not only a trading company but also acted as a colonial government. But far too little research has been done into this. These archives show how the VOC acted against colonized and non-European societies.”

The documents contain information about countless people, places, and events in a very large area, offering opportunities for all kinds of research. “You can do genealogical research and search for references to people. Or to local histories, for example, in Indonesia or India, by searching for information about events, places, or communities,” said Huygens Institute researcher Manjusha Kuruppath. “You will even find information about phenomena like disease and climate, which in turn can be of great importance for world historiography.”

The GLOBALISE partnership will continue to improve this project, making more information available to more people. “We think it is very important that this data is available to as many people as possible as quickly as possible,” said Lodewijk Petram of the Huygens Institute. “We expect to release an improved version at the end of the year.”

The text recognition was made with the open-source Loghi transcription software from the KNAW Humanities Cluster following the recent digitization of the VOC archives in the Netherlands, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka. The GLOBELISE collaboration includes the Huygens Institute, the International Institute for Social History, the Dutch National Archives, the Digital Infrastructure department of the KNAW Humanities Cluster, the VU University Amsterdam, and the University of Amsterdam.