was it organized? How did the Company obtain information, what registration
systems did they use, who registered what, and which path did the documents
follow in the Company's information network? In this article, I'll try to answer
the questions related to the information system of the Company. However, my
main question is whether a 'pulse' is identifiable in the archives of the VOC, and
whether the information system and network of the Company can be mapped (in
its literal and figurative content) by tracing 'archival events'. This is related to a
theory of the American anthropologist Ann Stoler - who introduced the above-
mentioned concepts of 'pulses' and 'archival events' - and the approach I have
taken to archival research. Before proceeding with the information system and
network of the Dutch East India Company, therefore, some words on archival
theory are necessary.
Archives as means of communication: 'the pulse of the archive'
In most cases, historians start their archival research with a certain 'historical
event' in mind. In the last decades this is the start of much research - including
mine - in the archives of the VOC. This could be research on the start of the
Company in 1602, on the Chinese Massacre in Batavia of 1740, or on the career
of one of the thousands of employees, to name a few. The archive of the Heeren
XVII is the most frequently requested archive in the reading room of the Dutch
National Archives. At the Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia, (international)
students increasingly discover the archive of the Hoge Regering. As much as
the archival documents are studied in their descriptive meaning, however, the
creation of the archival documents itself has hardly been studied.7 One can even
say - as Jacob Soli does in his study on the information system Jean-Baptiste
Colbert built for Louis XIV - that research on early modern (state) information
systems is scarce.8 Yet this kind of research gives us insight into the nature of
early modern data collecting and thereby improves our understanding of the
archival documents found in our repositories.
In my research, the archive itself is at the centre of investigation,9 as are
the interwoven organizations behind its creation. Specifically, the archive
of the Heeren XVII and the archive of the Hoge Regering are the subjects of
my research.10 Out of those archives themselves, the information system
and network of the Company will become clear. That is because, next to its
descriptive meaning, archival documents can also be seen as the leftovers of the
communication lines of the past. Filippo de Vivo proclaims in his research on
Information and communication in Venice (2007) that archival documents can be
NICO VRIEND AN UNBELIEVABLE AMOUNT OF PAPER: THE INFORMATION SYSTEM AND NETWORK OF
THE DUTCH EAST INDIA COMPANY
7 Femme Gaastra and Henk den Heijer have done institutional research on the organization of the VOC in
the Dutch Republic. Perry Moree has written on the postal system of the Company. Gaastra, Bewind en
beleid.bij de VOC; Gaastra, De geschiedenis van de VOC;. Heijer, De geoctrooieerde compagnie; Moree, 'Met
vriend die god geleide.
8 Soil, The information master, 9, and 175-note 52. Research on early modern state information systems has
been done by: Higgs, The information state; Vivo, Information and communication in Venice; Thomassen,
Instrumenten van de macht. Recommended reading on information systems of colonial states: Bayly, Empire
and information; Cohn, Colonialism; Richards, The imperial archive; Stoler, Along the archival grain; Mignolo,
The darker side of the Renaissance.
9 Ann Stoler advocated this approach in her study Along the archival grain. She calls for a methodological
shift from "archive-as-source" to "archive-as-subject," and from "reading against the archival grain" to
"reading along the archival grain." Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 1-53.
10 Meilink-Roelofsz, et al. De archieven van de Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie; Balk and van Dijk, Inventaris
van het archief van de gouverneur-generaal en raden van Indië.
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