GLOBALISE - Places in the Dutch East India Company Archives (1602-1799)

This dataset provides information about places that find mention in the archives of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC). It mainly includes places in Asian and African regions where the VOC operated, as well as a few places in Europe, the Americas, and Oceania. It informs users about the different names by which a place was/is known, provides users with geographical coordinates for the place, and classifies places by geographical feature and human habitation type. The dataset is created as part of the GLOBALISE project’s historical contextualisation work that is meant to assist the annotation of named entities in the archives, whose end goal is to make the VOC archives more accessible.
Information in this dataset has been collected and curated from various sources: the VOC archives; secondary works in the form of published selections of the archives such as the RGP editions of the Generale Missiven; online gazetteers such as GeoNames and the Atlas of Mutual Heritage dataset in the World Historical Gazetteer; other datasets about places, such as the Exploring Slave Trade in Asia dataset; and numerous other secondary sources, mainly in English and Dutch. It should be noted that this dataset is not a complete list of all places mentioned in the VOC archives, nor of all places in the regions the Company operated in.