The General Letters Ontology Based AccessibiLity InfraStructurE (GLOBALISE) project will create an innovative and sustainable research infrastructure to facilitate large-scale, in-depth and structured analyses of interactions between European and above all non-European actors in and around the empire of the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, VOC). The infrastructure will enable advanced new research on the processes of early globalization, colonialism and their formative influence on both Europe, in particular the Netherlands, and large areas of the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago.<br/><br/>GLOBALISE unlocks the General Letters, the key series of VOC reports from its Asian headquarters Batavia to the Dutch Republic. The reports are of crucial importance to our understanding of the history of the world, because they provide detailed and structured overviews of historical events and social, political, and economic developments occurring in the VOC empire and its surrounding world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The series of approximately 105,000 folios is also a pivotal source series because the observations in the reports function as a content-based key to the entire VOC archives. These consist of approximately twenty-five million pages of increasingly digitised documents, included in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register for the unique lens they provide on the history of our world.<br/><br/>The GLOBALISE research infrastructure removes the most significant barriers standing in the way of original research in this area. It applies an innovative combination of semantic and historical contextualisation methods on the transcriptions of the handwritten original General Letters. Entities, events and their interrelations will be identified, contextualised, and semantically modelled, allowing for complex queries and in-depth analysis of the corpus. The GLOBALISE research facility will be embedded in a VOC Lab at the KNAW Humanities Cluster, securing the institutional infrastructure which will guarantee the lasting and durable impact of the research facility on the national and international research landscape. The facility will stimulate new research collaborations and citizen science participation.<br/><br/>The (inter)national impact of this research facility will be substantial. The unique sources provided by the VOC and their incredible potential for research have for a long time interested scholars from around the globe. This has resulted in large bodies of published source editions, research aids and indexes, as well as structured datasets. Together, these form the basis of the semi-automated contextualisation processes, and will thus be enhanced and incorporated in the GLOBALISE research facility. The GLOBALISE research portal will undoubtedly attract a broad range of users, both national and international, from various academic disciplines. In addition, the project’s digital citizen- science workbench will mobilize public support for wider and labour-intensive efforts of (historical) contextualisation and stimulate the engagement of the public in our many-sided and increasingly also hotly-debated Dutch overseas history.