Welcome to the searchable database of Early Modern Dutch Colonial Court Records, 1637-1828. The dataset contains an index on the criminal and some civil court records of the major Dutch early modern overseas settlements: Batavia (Jakarta), Colombo, Cochin (Kochi), Kaapstad (Capetown), Elmina, Paramaribo and Curaçao. The database allows to search these court records on defendants, charges, places and other information.
Unique sources
The court records from the early modern Dutch colonial empire are a unique source and have been preserved quite well, especially for the eighteenth century.
The records show a large degree of uniformity across the colonies in Asia and the Atlantic,
and have for most places been preserved in ‘files’ with documents that relate to a specific court case.
These court case files mostly contain accusations, interrogations, (voluntary) declarations, sometimes complemented with other documents,
such as surgeon reports, letters or administrative records. The sentences were not systematically preserved in these files (with variations per settlement).
The colonial court records thus provide crucial insight not only into the legal and punitive regimes of Dutch colonialism,
but also contain rich and detailed information on everyday situations. Especially the interrogations and declarations give access to the voices of a wide
range of individuals living, working and travelling in and around different parts of the early modern Dutch colonial empire, from enslaved
individuals to company personnel, and from local inhabitants of colonial settlements to soldiers and sailors, from innkeepsters to merchants.
Database
The database is searchable with keywords. It can be filtered by category of crime (Aanklacht (gestandaardiseerd)), Sex (Geslacht),
and Court (Rechtbank).
The database contains entries for each defendant (persoon). It provides the following information: the year (jaar) of the court case,
the court (rechtbank), name of the defendant (persoon), the type of charge (categorie aanklacht) and the case ID.
Clicking on an entry reveals more details: the date of the charge (where available), the defendant’s profession and place of work, and any notes or remarks. Under Bron the source of the case can be found, along with a link to the digitized records in the National Archives and the transcriptions in the GLOBALISE Transcription Viewer (where available).
Content
The details of the archival inventory numbers for each colonial court collected in the database are pictured in the schematic overview below.
The right-most column indicates how many inventory numbers or individual cases are included in the dataset (as well as the total number of inventory numbers that
exist, where the data concerns a selection).
Durable storage and full open access
For more detailed analysis the full database is available at IISH Dataverse, via https://datasets.iisg.amsterdam/dataverse/resilient-diversity.
