VOC Court Records from Cape Town 1705-1774

Featuring court records from the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in Cape Town, covering the period from 1705 to 1774. It was created as part of the 'Resilient Diversity' research project coordinated by Catia Antunes, Ulbe Bosma, Karwan Fatah-Black, and Matthias van Rossum. The data originates from the Nationaal Archief in The Hague, archive number 1.04.02.

Use Cases

• Analyze legal case types and outcomes documented in VOC court records to study colonial justice.
• Examine the social and demographic composition of litigants and defendants mentioned in the records for historical social network analysis.
• Trace the evolution of legal governance and VOC administrative practices in Cape Town over the 1705-1774 period.
• Investigate the role of the Dutch East India Company and Dutch West India Company in colonial legal systems through case record analysis.

Strengths

• Provides a defined 69-year historical time range from 1705 to 1774.
• Sourced from the authoritative Nationaal Archief (The Hague), archive 1.04.02.
• Created by a coordinated academic research project hosted at Leiden University and the International Institute of Social History.

Limitations

• The specific data structure, including column names, row count, and sample data, is unavailable, hindering immediate analytical use.
• The dataset's completeness and coverage of all court cases within the stated period are unknown.

Provenance

Source

Nationaal Archief (The Hague), archive 1.04.02.

Collection Method

Created as part of the 'Resilient Diversity: the Governance of Racial and Religious Plurality in the Dutch Empire, 1600-1800' research project.

Time Range

1705-1774

Freshness

The metadata was last updated on 2026-02-02.

Geography

Cape Town