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

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 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; early modern maps; and numerous other secondary sources, mainly in English and Dutch.