The histories of enslavement in the early modern world can be traced through many kinds of archival and computational evidence: records of people and families, court cases, shipping, trade networks, prices, inventories, and colonial administration. The resources below bring together datasets, transcriptions, research tools, and thesauri for exploring these histories across the Indian Ocean, the Indonesian Archipelago, southern Africa, Madagascar, and the wider worlds connected to the Dutch East India Company (VOC).
Research tools
- Exploring Slave Trade in Asia — Explore data and networks relating to the Asian slave trade.
- Resilient Diversity — Investigate early modern colonial court records and the people, communities, and forms of diversity they document.
Datasets
People, demography & social history
- Overview of People in the TEPC Inventories (1673-1844) — People recorded in inventories from the Cape of Good Hope.
- Enslaved Demography Batavia (1678–1807) — Demographic data on enslaved people in Batavia.
- Mozambique Slave Traders (1750–1897)— Data on slave traders and the networks connecting Mozambique to wider Indian Ocean markets.
Trade, shipping & markets
- Monsoon Traders – 18th Century Makassar Shipping Data — Shipping data illuminating movement and trade through Makassar.
- French & Dutch Slave Trade on Madagascar (1641–1810)— Evidence on French and Dutch involvement in slave trading around Madagascar.
- Slave Trade Prices in the Indian Ocean, Indonesian Archipelago and Atlantic Worlds — Comparative data on prices and markets in different regions of the early modern world.
Law, power & colonial society
- Early Modern Dutch Colonial Court Records, 1637–1828 — Court records documenting conflicts, relationships, identities, and everyday life in Dutch colonial societies.
- VOC Court Records Cape Town, 1705–1774— Transformed data from VOC-era court records at the Cape of Good Hope.
Transcriptions
- TANAP Cape of Good Hope Transcriptions – Orphan Chamber — Transcriptions of records from the Orphan Chamber at the Cape of Good Hope.
- GLOBALISE transcription viewer — Search and explore transcriptions from the archives of the Dutch East India Company.
Thesauri & terminology
- Ethnicities, Religious Groups and Castes in the Archives of the Dutch East India Company (1602-1799) — A thesaurus for identities and group classifications encountered in VOC archival records