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Prisoners of the (written and accessible) Past: Reflections on Bias in the Dutch East India Company Historian’s Craft

Written by Manjusha Kuruppath

As an early modern historian, the written archive is vital to my craft. Fortunately, as a historian of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost Indische Compagnie, hereafter VOC), there is quite literally a sea of written archives that I can gleefully dive into to find pearls of information that I can string together to make the histories I write. As we might all be aware, this archive only offers a perspective of the past. The VOC entered the Indian Ocean World as a prospective trader in 1602 and established settlements and exercised varying levels of power and authority in territories of differing sizes in this maritime zone. Deploying the archives of the VOC for historical research warrants critically reflecting numerous avenues through which bias can manifest itself in the archive. It also calls on us to responsibly navigate these biases by looking within, and beyond the VOC archives. Such careful consideration of the core materials of our craft is necessary such that we can productively use these archives to write histories of both the VOC and the places, states, and people that were written about in these archives. In writing this blogpost, I do not purport to have answers or solutions for the biases that I enumerate. On the contrary, I intend to lay down a series of issues that historians of the VOC will encounter and need to inevitably ruminate about.

man with book infront of window with bananas dangling above
Brush drawing of a man, possibly Brandes himself, reading on the windowsill of probably the VOC ship Stavenisse on the route Batavia - Ceylon - Cape of Good Hope. Above the man's head hangs a bunch of bananas, colored in. Part of the sketchbook of Jan Brandes, vol. 2 (1808), p. 21. Image credit: Rijksmuseum.

Representation and Bias

The VOC archives are the administrative records of the trading corporation which traded in, wrested swathes of land, and fought wars over large territories in Asia and South Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Historians have argued that the view that this archive takes of the maritime world often manifested in the form of derogatory and patronizing characterizations of societies, religions, and cultures they encountered. Religions like Hinduism and Buddhism were presented as devilish and vile, governments were projected as despotic, and persons who opposed the ambitions of the company were projected as untrustworthy, selfish, and arrogant. Historians have learned to navigate these characterizations, as value-laden interpretations that were not representative of a reality. They have come to recognize these perspectives as revealing of the prejudices, anxieties, fears, and ambitions of the observers.1 Yet, at the same time, it is important to recognize that the archive is not all fiction and all Foucauldian discourse. While these layers of interpretation are key to studying our sources, and how contemporary observers wrote about their present, it should still be possible to peel away the layers of interpretation to reveal historical occurrences.2

The Presentist Bias

Present-day concerns invariably determine what facets of the past historians seek to study, and how they interpret the sources they analyse. Social movements in the last century such as the movement for gender equality have for instance generated interest in themes such as the history of gender and post-colonialism as a political condition in the past century generated an interest in subaltern histories, and histories of resistance.3 These topical themes of the twentieth and subsequently the twenty-first centuries were almost unheard of in the period that predated this phase. We can, without a sliver of doubt, in the aforementioned trends see that interests and perspectives strongly rooted in present day culture and political movements can be vastly beneficial in initiating inquiry into and shedding light on previously understudied themes. On the other hand, anachronism or imputing present day understandings of concepts into the past can be a problem. Historians need to acknowledge the fact that the past is indeed a foreign country.4 How we understand ethnicity and race in the present day starkly differs from, for instance, how these concepts were understood by the VOC. ‘European’ was not necessarily understood as a racial category, but more as a social one. No example can illustrate this argument better than the recruitment and appointment of Jan van Velsen, to the position of Dutch commander at the court, who is described in the VOC records as “dark-skinned and born of a Javanese mother.”5 This instance forces us to take a long hard look at how we comprehend Europeanness in the context of the Dutch East India Company, who we understand as being the employees of the VOC, and the interracial unions which were very much a reality in Dutch settlements like Batavia.

“The Embarrassment of Riches”6

The Dutch East India Company has left behind an obscenely voluminous archive. While on one hand, especially with regards to the English-speaking world, and those territories in maritime Asia where the VOC enjoyed a presence, it is befitting to complain about the underutilization of the archives to study histories. On the other hand, in contexts where the VOC archives have been researched and utilized, I have often wondered how this mammoth archive has influenced the historical conclusions we arrive at. Have the Dutch East India Company’s penchant for record keeping, and the fact that a large part of these records have survived the exegesis of time impacted history writing? In other words, are the VOC overrepresented in histories of early modern maritime Asia? Have these archives led to historians misjudging the strength of Dutch shipping in relation to local trade? Has it led to historians overstating the presence of the VOC and in some regions, overemphasizing the colonial role and impact of the VOC? Historians of the VOC have often sought to balance out their overreliance on the VOC archive, with recourse to other European archives like the English, French, and Portuguese, and archives of other regions and empires such as Mughal, Japanese, or Javanese. More often than not, seeking recourse to alternative source material (that can also be scientific or archaeological and the like) can often be unbalanced and weighted almost entirely in favour of the VOC archives owing to its vastness.

Downsides of Digitization

Just as we carefully consider and craft solutions for dealing with these very relevant and real issues, the digitalization of the Dutch East India Company archives has flung new challenges into the mix. While previously historians had to visit archival institutions such as the National Archives in the Hague in person and pore over archival documents for days and months on end, scanned and transcribed versions of the documents can now be perused online anywhere in the world free of change. On one hand, this accessibility radically tears down biases, in terms of who previously could and who can now access and read these archives.7 On the other hand, it raises new questions as to how increased accessibility of the VOC archives can result in the overutilization of the digitized VOC archives at the expense of other local archives. A foreseeable and inevitable consequence of this engagement will be overrepresentation of the VOC in the writing of early modern histories.

  1. See for instance Tracy, James D. “Asian Despotism? Mughal Government as Seen From the Dutch East India Company Factory in Surat”, Journal of Early Modern History 3, 3 (1999): 256-280, doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/157006599X00260 ↩

  2. For a penetrating analysis of this friction between recognizing these sources as records of historical occurrences, and as literary analysis and the historicity of texts, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, In “The Company of the Mughals between Sir Thomas Roe and William Norris,” in Mughals and Franks: Explorations in Connected History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), 144. ↩

  3. According to Thom, women’s history benefited from the British feminist movement and left politics. Thom, Deborah, “What happened to Gender and History,” French Journal of British Studies, Vol. XIV-4, 2008. https://doi.org/10.4000/rfcb.5978. ↩

  4. ‘The past is a foreign country’ is the title of David Lowenthal’s popular work. Lowenthal, David, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). ↩

  5. Memorie Van den Raad Extraordinair van India en afgaande Gouverneur en Directeur van Java’s Noord Oostcust Nicolaas Hartingh. NL-HaNA, VOC, 3000, 0103, transcription GLOBALISE project, March 2024. https://transcriptions.globalise.huygens.knaw.nl/detail/urn:globalise:NL-HaNA_1.04.02_3000_0103. Accessed on 14th March 2025. ↩

  6. This phrase has been borrowed from the title of Simon Schama’s book. Schama, Simon, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Random House, 1997). ↩

  7. See Lassig for a pertinent discussion on the subject. Simone Lässig, ‘Digital History: Challenges and Opportunities for the Profession’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 47, no. 1 (2021): 5-34 (here: 14-15). https://doi.org/10.13109/gege.2021.47.1.5. ↩

  8. For information on the image, see: https://id.rijksmuseum.nl/200242629 ↩