NWO grant for lasting impact of the VOC on present-day Java
The Dutch East India Company (VOC) kept meticulous records of the territories in which it operated. Its cartographers mapped infrastructure, settlements and land use in considerable detail. For the first time, this historical data is being compared with current figures from the Indonesian bureau of statistics, to explore the enduring impact of early colonialism on present-day Java.
This is the focus of a four-year research project, Enduring Empire: Measuring Early Dutch Colonialism’s Lasting Impact in Indonesia, led by Lodewijk Petram of the Huygens Institute and Maarten Bosker of the Erasmus School of Economics. The project has been awarded funding by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).
The project builds on influential studies in economic history examining how colonial policy has shaped long-term development outcomes. In 2024, economists Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson were awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for their pioneering work in this field, demonstrating how differences in national prosperity often stem from the ways in which countries were colonized in the past.
Mining VOC archives with digital tools
Until recently, investigations into colonialism’s long-term effects have largely focused on the 19th and 20th centuries, due to a lack of accessible data from earlier periods. However, recent advances in digitisation and applications of artificial intelligence (ai) have now made it possible to systematically examine older sources.
Archives meet statistics
The ongoing GLOBALISE project at the Huygens Institute and The International Institute of Social History (IISG) has made millions of VOC documents from the 17th and 18th centuries digitally available and searchable. These sources contain extensive details on infrastructure, settlement patterns and land use. Modern technology also enables researchers to extract data from historical maps.
Unlocking and analysing this kind of historical material is a long-standing specialism of the Huygens Institute. Now that the VOC archives have been digitised through the GLOBALISE project, the Huygens Institute is drawing on them for new research as part of Enduring Empire. The aim is to connect historical records with current data from Indonesia’s national statistics agency, Badan Pusat Statistik (BPS).
Collaborations
The Huygens Institute contributes its expertise in historical research and digital methods, while the Erasmus School of Economics brings in-depth knowledge of development economics and causal analysis, alongside extensive experience handling Indonesian microdata. The project team aims to collaborate with Indonesian researchers to deepen their understanding of a shared colonial history.
Open Access
All collected datasets and annotated maps will be made freely available through Open Access, allowing other researchers to make use of them.
