Information on the move. Colonial archives: pillars of past global information exchange

Do the current focus on global issues in the historical discipline and the attention that is paid to globalisation also provide new perspectives for our view on colonial archives? These questions are the core of this article. In this contribution I discuss whether it makes sense to connect ideas and insights of globalisation to the colonial archives in order to get a better understanding of the nature and patterns of information exchange and to get a different, maybe better understanding of the substance of these archives. In the second part of this article I pay closer attention to the Dutch colonial archives reated in the early 19th century.