Research Without Travelling
Twenty years ago work on Asante–Dutch history meant a reading room in The Hague and a research trip to Ghana. A great deal can now be done from a laptop anywhere in the world, and for students, community researchers and family historians this has changed what is realistically possible. What follows is a map of what is freely available, what it is good for, and where the gaps still are.
Archival Scans
Nationaal Archief
The Dutch national archive publishes an increasing proportion of its holdings as free digital images at nationaalarchief.nl. Coverage is uneven and driven by demand, condition and project funding: some series are complete, others are not scanned at all. The finding aids, however, are entirely online, so you can always establish what exists and how it is described before deciding whether to order originals or travel. For West India Company and Guinea coast material this is the single most important resource.
Ghanaian and British material
PRAAD has run digitisation projects but does not maintain a comprehensive public online catalogue, so Ghanaian archival material still generally requires a visit or a local researcher. The British National Archives at Kew has a full online catalogue and a large body of digitised material relating to the Gold Coast and Ashanti, which is often the quickest way to check the British side of an episode.
Atlas of Mutual Heritage
The Atlas of Mutual Heritage, at atlasofmutualheritage.nl, is a database of maps, drawings, prints and descriptions of the places where the Dutch East and West India Companies were active, assembled from Dutch archives and museums. For the Gold Coast it brings together fort plans, coastal views and topographical drawings that would otherwise be scattered across several institutions. It is a very efficient starting point for anything visual, and each record links back to the holding institution.
Delpher
Delpher, at delpher.nl, is the Dutch national library's full-text search across digitised newspapers, books and periodicals. It is transformative for the nineteenth century. Searching Dutch newspapers for Elmina, Ashantijnen, Goudkust, Kust van Guinea or the names of officials produces shipping notices, parliamentary reporting, opinion pieces, obituaries and the public argument over the transfer of the Gold Coast possessions to Britain. It is also the fastest route into Dutch public opinion about the recruitment of West African soldiers for the East Indies army.
Two cautions. Optical character recognition on nineteenth-century type is imperfect, so vary your spellings and expect misses. And copyright restricts full access for more recent material, which is viewable only in library reading rooms.
Museum Catalogues
- Wereldmuseum — the shared collection database of the merged Dutch ethnographic museums, searchable online, with images for a large proportion of records and increasingly with provenance information attached.
- Rijksmuseum — a fully open catalogue with high-resolution downloads of out-of-copyright material, useful for prints, maps, portraits and objects connected to the Company period.
- British Museum — a very large searchable catalogue including the Asante gold associated with the events of 1874.
- Europeana — an aggregator that searches across many European institutions at once; a good way to find holdings in smaller museums you would not think to check.
Printed Sources Out of Copyright
The classic travel accounts are long out of copyright and freely readable. Bosman's description of the Guinea coast, Dapper's and Ogilby's compilations, Bowdich's 1819 mission narrative and Dupuis's 1824 journal can all be found in scanned editions through the Internet Archive, Google Books, Project Gutenberg and the Dutch digital library. Where several editions exist, prefer the earliest you can find and note which one you used; nineteenth-century reprints were sometimes silently abridged.
A Working Method
- Use the published guides and secondary literature to identify which archive series or which author is likely to hold what you need.
- Check the Nationaal Archief finding aid for that series and see whether scans exist.
- Search Delpher in parallel for contemporary published discussion, using period spellings.
- Check the Atlas of Mutual Heritage and the museum catalogues for images and objects relating to the same place or event.
- Record full references as you go — archive, access number, inventory number, or catalogue number and institution. Digital convenience makes it very easy to end up with a folder of images you cannot cite.
What Digitisation Does Not Solve
The material available online is overwhelmingly European. Dutch and British institutions have had the funding to digitise; Ghanaian archives have not, on anything like the same scale. The practical effect is that a researcher working entirely online will read a colonial version of the past, because that is the version that has been scanned. Oral tradition, palace records, Ghanaian archival holdings and the knowledge of living practitioners are not on the internet, and no amount of digitised Dutch correspondence substitutes for them. Digital sources are best understood as the part of the work that can now be done in advance, so that time spent in Kumasi, Accra or The Hague is spent on what only being there can provide.
