The VOC Archives Go Digital: €3.8 Million to Open Up 25 Million Pages

Heritage · VOC archives

The archive of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), the company our ancestors helped found in 1602, is being opened up to researchers worldwide. The Dutch Research Council (NWO) has awarded €3.8 million to GLOBALISE, a project to make this vast collection digitally searchable.

What was funded

On 21 May 2021, the Huygens Institute for History of the Netherlands announced that GLOBALISE had been awarded €3.8 million under NWO’s scientific infrastructure programme. The project runs from 2021 to 2026 and brings together the Huygens Institute, VU Amsterdam, the National Archives of the Netherlands, the International Institute of Social History and the Humanities Cluster of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Its aim is to remove the barriers that have kept the archive hard to use: seventeenth- and eighteenth-century handwriting, old Dutch spelling, and places and people whose names changed over time. The records cover a region stretching from South Africa and the Middle East to India, Indonesia, China and Japan, and speak to trade, labour, slavery, colonial violence and cultural exchange.

Five million scans, now searchable

In October 2023 the project reached its first public milestone: five million scans from the VOC archives, transcribed automatically with the Loghi handwriting-recognition software, were made full-text searchable through a GLOBALISE prototype.

Why it matters to us

The VOC pioneered many of the tools finance still relies on, from tradable shares to a permanent capital base. For a family whose ancestors were among its co-founders, open access to the company’s own records is both a personal link to our history and a resource for understanding where modern financial engineering began, including its human costs. We explored that legacy in Lessons From the VOC, the Cradle of Modern Financial Engineering.