The board of The Corts Foundation is honoured to announce that Stone & Stone awarded our second Senshi Sōsho- publication vol. 26 “ The Operations of the Navy in the Dutch East Indies and the Bay of Bengal” with her Editor's Choice Award for books of 2018 (see http://books.stonebooks.com/book/1019885/).

Stone & Stone recommended our publication as follows:
“This English translation of volume 26 of the Japanese Senshi Sōsho series stands out as one of the most important WWII publications of the year. It's difficult to conceive how anyone can understand these operations from the IJN perspective without utilizing this work.”

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The Corts Foundation is pleased to announce that the publication called “The Diplomatic Correspondence between the Kingdom of Siam and the Castle of Batavia during the 17th and 18th century” is translated and published in the Thai language. By translating original Dutch correspondence into English, Indonesian and now Thai, this unique correspondence becomes more accessible to historians worldwide, and especially also now in Thailand.

The important archival discovery of hundreds of diplomatic letters in the archives of the Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia (ANRI) led to a project to highlight a few of these letters in particular. This treasure trove of unique correspondence between the Royal Court in Ayutthaya and Batavia Castle show the cultural heritage and the economic history of Southeast Asia. It is a rich source for the maritime history of Asia, as it specifies the old inter-Asian trade network and the close ties between kingdoms in the region.

The diplomatic letters are preserved in the archives of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) that were granted the status of UNESCO Memory of the World in 2004. They have a protected status and are regarded an important written source of global history. The correspondence is included in the archival series called ‘the Daily Journals of Batavia Castle’ (1624-1807) and are part of digitalized archives that can be accessed online at: www.sejarah-nusantara.anri.go.id .

All three versions of the Diplomatic letters publication can be found here:
[Thai language version >>]  [English version >>]  [Indonesian version >>]

 
This project has been made possible by The Corts Foundation in collaboration with ANRI and the Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, and with financial support of the Royal Dutch Embassy in Bangkok.

On 24 September 2018, the Corts Foundation concluded her second Senshi Sōsho project with the publication of volume 26 of the Senshi Sōsho series by Leiden University Press, both in print and Open Access, titled "The Operations of the Navy in the Dutch East Indies and the Bay of Bengal". The presentation was held in the Great Auditorium of Leiden University with guests anrepresentatives from several countries, in particular Japan, Indonesia, USA and the Netherlands.

The publication is available at:
The Leiden University Repository
[Download PDF >>] [Order a copy >>]

The publication concerns the translation from Japanese into English of the operations of the Japanese Imperial Navy during the invasion of the Dutch East Indies at the start of the second world war. The book presents new insights in these operations, in particular the operations in the Java Sea on 27 and 28 February 1942, when an allied fleet under the command of Rear Admiral Karel Doorman was defeated with a large loss of life. 

Dr. Willem Remmelink, as final editor, was responsible for final edition and translation, assisted by an advisory board of Japanese and Dutch experts.
On 24 September 2018, the president of the Corts Foundation, Mr. Egbert Jacobs, presented the first copy to Prof. Dr. Rutgers, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities of Leiden University, Mr. Hiroshi Inomata, Ambassador of Japan, and Mr. Theo Doorman, son of the late Rear Admiral Karel Doorman. Additional copies were presented to Captain Mark A. Imblum, U.S. Navy Defense and Naval Attaché, Mr Din Wahid, the cultural attaché of Indonesia, and Prof. Dr. Ing. Wardiman Djojonegoro, former Secretary of Education of Indonesia.

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The archives of the High Government of Batavia from the 17th and 18th century has been digitized for an important part. The last few years The Corts Foundation and Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia published more than a million scans of archival documents on the Indonesian website sejarah-nusantara.anri.go.id . 
The closing episide of this collaboration is the recent online publication of 1175 maps and their data. Mostly land surveying maps of Batavia and their surrounding lands provide insight into the use of land and division of plots at the time.

The collection has been formed by the government archivist de Haan, who extracted the maps from the archive and put them in a separate archive collection. This collection is now published and made searchable with the descriptions that were created bij de Haan himself at the beginning of the 20th century.

The collectie can be found at: ANRI collectie de Haan