Bookkeeper-General Batavia

This database offers information concerning the circulation of commodities as found in the administration of the Bookkeeper-General (Boekhouder-Generaal) of the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, for short VOC) in Batavia, in the eighteenth century.

Overview

This resource introduced in four minutes.

The database Bookkeeper-General Batavia provides information on products and voyages of the Dutch East India Company's (VOC) trade in Asia during the eighteenth century. The database contains information from the records of the bookkeeper-general (the head bookkeeper) of the VOC in Batavia (present-day Jakarta).

For two centuries, from 1602-1799, the VOC transported many diverse products, from food to (luxury) goods, as well as enslaved people. The VOC used thousands of ships for this endeavour, from East Indiamen (the most commonly used and largest merchant ships) to smaller vessels such as barques (a type of sailing vessel) and sloops that were mainly used for shipping within Nusantara (now the Indonesian and Malay Archipelago). Trade was recorded for the entire patent area of the VOC by the bookkeeper-general and his clerks in Batavia, where the headquarters in Asia was located. However, there was also trade that remained off the books, including the slave trade by the VOC. Every year, copies of the ledgers, negotation books and journals, in short, the entire central accounting system, were sent to the Amsterdam and Zeeland Chambers of the VOC. Both originals and copies of these transcripts from the bookkeeper-general have, for the most part, been lost. However, of the transcripts for the eighteenth century, 55 book years ('volumes') have been preserved that, for each financial year, recorded how many and which goods were transported between the Dutch Republic and the patent area, as well as within the patent area itself. These 55 volumes are the sources for this overview, since the accounts of more than 18,000 voyages and 250,000 products can be found in the general journals. The database Bookkeeper-General Batavia describes several details of each voyage and is searchable on the following aspects: the name of the ship, place and date of departure and arrival, the products and the values and units of these products.

How to use this resource

There are different ways to use this dataset. The data can be accessed through the search engine on the website which has several filters to help guide your search. The data can be downloaded as a CSV file, with seperate files for voyages and cargo. The download button appears beneath each table with results.

When the user has reached a result screen for their search, most of the column headers can be clicked to sort the results alphabetically, on date or on quantity. To make full use of the option 'download as Excel', it might be necessary to change the computer settings for the decimal symbol and the list separator. If you want to use the downloaded results in Excel, the decimal symbol must become a '.' (dot) and the list seperator must become ',' (comma). Please note, you can only download in Excel if the selection in the result does not exceed 65536 lines.

All field names and part of the remarks in the database are in English. The information within the fields, however, has mostly been retained in Dutch to follow the source as closely as possible. An exception has been made for the annotations found in the remark field for both voyage and product. These were entered in English in those cases where no information would be lost in translation; in all other cases the original Dutch text was transcribed.

The surviving originals, supplemented by some remaining copies are currently preserved at the National Archives of the Netherlands (The Hague) as a seperate collection (access number 1.04.18.02) next to the Archives of the VOC, which originated from the Heren XVII and the Chambers in the Netherlands (access number 1.04.02). In order to enable the user to easily trace back the original source, the number of the general journal as well as the folio number of every voyage is entered.

Learn

  • An elaborate explanation and introduction to the database is written bij Judith Schooneveld-Oosterling and Gerrit Knaap and can be consulted here.
  • For the purpose or researchinto VOC archives, a general VOC-Glossarium has been compiled, based on the individual glossaries that accompanied the publications on the VOC in the Rijks Geschiedkundige Publicatiën (RGP). The VOC-Glossarium is an explanatory overview of particular VOC terms.
  • An overview of all bookkeeper-generals in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can be accessed here.
  • An overview of ships participating in the trade between the Dutch Republic and Asia can be obtained from the database Dutch-Asiatic Shipping, or from the VOC site.
  • Information about units of weight and measurement used in 18th century Asia can be found here.
  • Other quantitative databases which might be of interest to users of the Bookkeeper-General Batavia dataset are the previously mentioned Dutch-Asiatic Shipping and VOC: Persons on board.

Mentions

Several individual historians have utilised part of the information of the Bookkeeper-General Batavia (BGB) collection, most notably Els M. Jacobs in her dissertation: Merchant in Asia; The Trade of the Dutch East India Company during the Eighteenth Century (Leiden, 2006), but none have attempted to make a database with information from the BGB collection on the scale of the current.

Van Rossum, M., Kleurrijke tragiek: De geschiedenis van slavernij in Azië onder de VOC (Hilversum, 2015).

Mbeki, L. and M. van Rossum, 'Private slave trade in the Duthc Indian Ocean world: a study into the networkd and backgrounds of the slavers and the enslaved in South Asia and South Africa', in Slavery & Abolition 38, no. 1 (2017), 95-116. https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2016.1159004

The Huygens Institute, Studio Bertels and Studio Louter collaborated to offer VOC data to the general public in the form of a user-friendly and engaging data experience installation that was shown in different locations, among which the Scheepvaartmuseum, the National Archives in The Hague and the Maritime Museum in Rotterdam. The visitor could choose between different data visualisations created around the lives of 100,000 seamen and military personnel who travelled to Asia in the eighteenth century, that are shown to them using augmented reality. The data used for the experience was taken from three datasets: VOC-Opvarenden, Dutch-Asiatic Shipping and Bookkeeper-General Batavia. See the website and video to find out more about the data experience.