Why This Archive Matters
For roughly two and a half centuries the Dutch presence on the Gold Coast generated paper: council resolutions, day-registers, letters home, trade accounts, muster rolls, inventories of forts. Most of what survives of it is now in the Nationaal Archief in The Hague. For anyone working on Asante–Dutch relations this is the single richest documentary body in existence, and it is the counterweight to the British sources that dominate the literature on nineteenth-century Ghana. The archives of the West India Company were inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World register in 2011, jointly with partner countries, in recognition of exactly that significance.
What Survives — and What Does Not
The first thing a researcher should understand is that the record is uneven. The archive of the first West India Company, chartered in 1621, was badly treated after the Company's reorganisation and again in the nineteenth century, when large quantities of Company paper were sold off as waste. What remains of the pre-1674 material is therefore a fragment. The archive of the second Company, from 1674 to its dissolution at the end of the eighteenth century, is far better preserved, and the records of the Dutch possessions on the coast of Guinea after the Company's end — running down to the transfer to Britain in 1872 — form a substantial and largely continuous series.
The Main Bodies of Record
- Archives of the Old West India Company (1621–1674) — chamber records, resolutions and scattered correspondence. Fragmentary.
- Archives of the Second West India Company (1674–1791) — the Heren Tien, the chambers of Amsterdam and Zeeland in particular, and the incoming letters and journals from the African and American posts.
- Nederlandse Bezittingen ter Kuste van Guinea (NBKG) — the archive generated on the coast itself, at Elmina and the outforts, and continuing after the Company was wound up until the possessions were handed to Britain. This is the series most historians of Asante–Dutch contact spend their time in.
- Ministerial and colonial ministry files — the nineteenth-century policy correspondence between The Hague and Elmina, including the recruitment of West African soldiers for the East Indies army and the negotiations that ended in the 1870–71 treaties with Britain.
- Map and drawing collections — including the Leupe collection of foreign maps, which holds plans and views of the forts.
The Documents You Will Actually Use
Day-registers and journals
The dagregisters kept at Elmina are the workhorse source: a running record, sometimes daily, of arrivals and departures, prices, deaths, disputes, messages received from Kumasi, and the movements of Asante envoys. They are the closest thing available to a diary of the Dutch–Asante relationship as it was experienced on the ground.
Council minutes and correspondence
Resolutions of the council at Elmina record decisions and, more usefully, the arguments preceding them. Letters between Elmina and the Netherlands set out how the men on the coast explained their situation to their employers — which is not always how they described it to each other.
Accounts, inventories and muster rolls
Financial and personnel records are the least read and often the most reliable. Fort inventories, garrison lists and payment records establish scale, staffing and the material reality of the posts in a way narrative sources rarely do.
How the Archive Is Organised
Dutch archives are arranged by toegang — an access or finding aid, each with its own number, containing a numbered inventory of files. You cite a document by giving the archive, the access number, and the inventory number of the file. The West India Company and Guinea coast finding aids sit in the archive's colonial group, and each has an introduction that is worth reading in full: these introductions explain the administrative history of the body concerned, which is what tells you where a given kind of document is likely to have ended up.
Practical Advice
- Start with the finding aid, not the catalogue search box. Full-text search will not find you material described only at file level in seventeenth-century administrative vocabulary. Browsing the inventory structure is more productive.
- Expect early modern Dutch palaeography. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch hands, abbreviations and spelling take practice. Online palaeography tutorials aimed at Dutch archives are the fastest way in.
- Use the published guides. The annotated guide to Dutch archival sources on Ghana compiled by Michel Doortmont and Jinna Smit is the standard route into this material, and Albert van Dantzig's published selections of documents from the archive give a sense of what the sources look like before you travel.
- Check what has been scanned. A growing proportion of the material is available as digital images through the Nationaal Archief website at nationaalarchief.nl, free to view. What is not scanned must be ordered in advance for the reading room.
- Register before you travel. Reading room access requires a reader's card, and originals generally have to be requested ahead of your visit. Check the institution's current conditions on its website rather than relying on second-hand accounts.
Reading Against the Grain
These are the records of a commercial and colonial administration, written by its employees for their superiors. They describe Asante from outside, in the language of trade and threat, and they were shaped by what the writers wanted The Hague to believe. Used carefully, though, they are indispensable: they preserve names, dates, prices and diplomatic exchanges that exist nowhere else, and they can be checked against Asante oral tradition and against the British record to produce something closer to a full account.
