“We have decided at the meeting of 1 June to impose a heavier punishment on that people, to strike fear into them, so that those of the Company's slaves who run away and are recaptured will be flogged for the first time and branded on the cheek; the second time, a brand on the other cheek, and the third time, in addition to flogging, to cut off the nose and ears, insofar as they may not have committed a crime during their escape that is punishable by death”.
The recent digitalisation of the UNESCO Memory of the World-listed Dutch East India Company (VOC) archives has opened the door to new kinds of research into Dutch colonialism and the lives of those subject to it. These archives contain vast information on the inner workings of the VOC and the societies in which they operated. Major infrastructure projects, such as Globalise, have worked to increase the accessibility and searchability of these archives using machine learning techniques for handwritten text recognition (HTR). On a smaller scale, projects at the International Institute of Social History have transcribed another 15 inventories of the VOC archives to make them accessible for research, equalling around 2.5 million individual pages.
The resulting corpus of around 7.5 million transcribed pages provides an opportunity for computational approaches to research. In this presentation, I propose to explore how the physical body was impacted by the process and experience of enslavement in the context of the VOC. This topic has been researched in the context of the British Caribbean by Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy, however, there is no comparable research in the Asian context. Hunt-Kennedy argues that in the Caribbean context, “the disabilities produced by slavery and endured by the enslaved became a sign of slaveowner power and a physical marker of Africans’ enslaved status” while simultaneously, “such marks also told a narrative of enslaved people’s personhood, survival, and their refusal to accept their enslavement”. I will explore the validity of this statement in the context of Asian slavery and the dynamic between enslavement, the physical body, and resistance. The opening extract from the Cape of Good Hope describes, in the Dutch colonial context, how slaves who attempted to resist were potentially subject to significant physical punishment, a demonstration of the power of the VOC, but also an indication of active desertion and resistance.
While this decision could be individually identified using the Globalise transcriptions viewer, in this research, I will make use of digital humanities techniques to explore newly searchable transcriptions of the VOC archives at scale. Specifically, I will use lexical searching in combination with natural language processing techniques, including named entity recognition, to create a dataset of potential observations of moments of resistance by enslaved peoples. Furthermore, I will explore data visualisation to analyse trends in the kinds of bodies which were commodified as slave labour, punishments received, and locations of resistance. I will discuss the challenges of working with automatically transcribed material, which are often rife with spelling errors and layout mistakes. This will result in both a research database and a starting point for close reading, to delve into the archives in a targeted way to explore the relationship between resistance, the body, and enslavement in VOC controlled societies.
1. Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, Boekhouder-Generaal te Batavia, access number 1.04.18.02, Inventory Number: 10458, pp. 61. Cape of the Good Hope, 1712: Register of Letters, Books, and Other Papers. Translated from Dutch
2. ‘Archieven van de Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie’, accessed 2 March 2026, https://unesco.nl/memory-of-the-world/archieven-van-de-verenigde-oost-indische-compagnie.
3. ‘Globalise Project Overview’, GLOBALISE, accessed 1 May 2025, https://globalise.huygens.knaw.nl/project_overview/.
4. Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy, ‘Disability History in Slavery’s Archive’, in Early Modern Medicine, 1st edn, by Olivia Weisser (Routledge, 2024), 261, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003094876-19.
5. ‘Globalise Transcriptions Viewer’, accessed 2 March 2026, https://transcriptions.globalise.huygens.knaw.nl/.