Johan Visser launches the Dutch Atlantic Sources platform: ‘Enough material for a lifetime of research’
Award image: Vincent Noppe
Anyone conducting research into the West India Company (WIC) and the Netherlands’ role in Atlantic trade and slavery in the seventeenth century can now turn to a new platform. Historian Johan Visser presented Dutch Atlantic Sources at the Historicidagen.
The new platform contains more than 170,000 digitised and online searchable pages, all relating to the day-to-day operations of the WIC up to around 1674. Visser scoured dozens of institutions for these sources. Visser: ‘Most of the sources come from the Netherlands, but there are also, for example, texts from the National Library of Brazil and the New York State Archives. In total, around thirty metres of paperwork has been made searchable for users. In collaboration with the National Archives, dozens of inventory numbers have been made digitally accessible for the first time. That is enough material for a lifetime of research.’
Piecing the puzzle together
Visser himself has used the database in recent years for his research into the food supply of the West India Company. ‘We know that the company constantly struggled to provide for the people within its system, from enslaved people to soldiers and (to a lesser extent) the elite,’ he explains. ‘At the same time, the early modern period saw an incredibly vibrant propaganda campaign about the New World. It was said to be an earthly paradise, with two harvests a year and fruit that you could pick straight from the tree. I wanted to know why, despite that natural wealth, the WIC had such difficulty keeping people alive.’
This presented a methodological challenge. Visser: ‘There isn’t a single book from the Atlantic world that explains why food supply was so difficult. That information is scattered across all sorts of sources, such as letters, warehouse stock lists and ship’s logs. By building the database, I was able to bring all those fragments together. What’s more, the platform is accessible from anywhere in the world. If someone from Ghana wants to look up information about Elmina’s history of slavery, it might save them the cost of a flight and the trouble of deciphering a Dutch manuscript.’
Grants
In any case, the platform has already reached the United States. Visser has been awarded a Fulbright scholarship to conduct research at the New Netherland Institute in Albany into ideas about the fertility of the land. ‘On the one hand, New Netherland – which we know as New Amsterdam or New York – is presented as an incredibly fertile land of milk and honey. On the other hand, the same is said about the so-called wild coast of Brazil, but that, of course, has a completely different climate. This gives rise to two parallel discussions. I want to find out how it is explained that two different regions are both described as fertile. The database can help with this, as it allows me to map out networks between people, plants and goods very quickly.’
Visser also wants to bring people together in real life. ‘I’m fortunate to have been awarded a KNAW Pioneer Grant for first-generation researchers, which will enable me to organise a workshop during my stay in the US to reflect, together with several historians, on the development of the historiography of the Dutch Atlantic Region and the role of technological progress and AI.’
Before that can happen, however, Visser still needs to complete his thesis. ‘I always find writing more difficult than building a database,’ he laughs. ‘Fortunately, I’ll have plenty of time and space over the coming months to finish the text at my own pace.’