The records of the Dutch East India Company are recognized to be a major source material on Indian history for the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. The Company, established in 1602, was the biggest trading entity of its time. It engaged in extensive trading operations in India for nearly two hundred years. The letters, reports and other documents available in the Company’s archives contain an enormous amount of detail on a variety of subjects. While commercial and economic matters arising out of the Company’s own trade in the subcontinent as well as that of its rivals, including the Indian merchants, figure prominently in its documentation, these are not the only concerns of these records. Political, social, religious, and other matters are often found to have been discussed extensively in these documents. A particular strength of these records is the solid quantitative data they contain on a large number of variables. The use of these documents for the writing of Indian history thus far has been somewhat restricted because of the barrier of both language and palaeography. The present collection, second in the series, makes these documents available in the English language with detailed annotation.
There are no reviews yet.