Diamonds in Borneo: Commodities as Concepts in Context

Abstract

The intensified circulation of people, commodities and ideas is one of the characteristics of a globalizing world. To understand the causes and consequences of these circulations, we have to know which commodities circulated when and where, on what scale and who made them circulate. In our paper we want to present the first results of a CLARIAH Research Pilot1 on diamonds in Borneo, using the large historical newspaper collection of the KB (Royal Library of the Netherlands) in Delpher2. So far the diamond industry in Borneo has been a true blind spot in our knowledge on the global diamond commodity chain. We have little information on where diamonds were found, who the miners and traders were and if there was really an 'age-old' diamond polishing industry as literature suggests. We believe that the newspapers can provide more information on this topic. To answer these questions, we developed a workflow that enables us to query the KB newspaper collection in an efficient and elaborate way that can also be used for research on other commodities.