Maarten Bosker, Professor of International Trade and Economic Development at Erasmus School of Economics, and Lodewijk Petram of the Huygens Institute have received an NWO grant for the four-year research project “Enduring Empire: Measuring Early Dutch Colonialism’s Lasting Impact in Indonesia”. In this project, they will study whether and how early Dutch colonialism (17th and 18th centuries) still has an impact on modern-day Java.
The project team is thus joining influential economic-historical research into the impact of colonial policy on the development of countries in the long term. Researchers Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2024 for their groundbreaking research in this field. They discovered that differences in prosperity between countries often have to do with the way in which they were colonised in the past.
Unlocking old VOC sources
Until recently, research into the lasting influence of colonial policy focused mainly on the 19th and 20th centuries. This was because there was little suitable data available for earlier periods. Recent developments in digitalisation and artificial intelligence now also make it possible to study older sources systematically. This is a specialism of the Huygens Institute, where the ongoing GLOBALISE project has already made millions of VOC documents from the 17th and 18th centuries digitally unlocked and searchable.
From archives to statistics
These sources contain rich information about infrastructure, settlements and land use, among other things. With modern technology, this information can be extracted from old maps and archives. By then linking this historical data to current statistics from the Indonesian Bureau of Statistics, the project team can investigate in great detail to what extent, and in what way, early colonial policy still has an impact on modern-day Java.
Collaboration partners
The Huygens Institute contributes its expertise in the field of historical sources and digital research methods to the new project. Erasmus School of Economics provides specialist knowledge in the field of development economics and causal analysis, and has extensive experience in processing Indonesian microdata. In addition, the project team actively seeks collaboration with Indonesian researchers to exchange knowledge about the shared colonial past.
- More information
The collected datasets and map annotations will be made available as open access, so that other researchers can also benefit from them. For more information, please contact Ronald de Groot, Media and Public Relations Officer at Erasmus School of Economics: rdegroot@ese.eur.nl, +31 6 53 641 846.
