The Lakenhal depot houses three nineteenth-century sample books in which the cotton company De Heyder & Co kept precise records of who placed which orders. History student Marit Scheepsma used them to find out more about the company's colonial contacts.
'Everyone knows Leiden as the 17th-century cloth city, but in the 19th century it became a cotton city,' says Marit. 'That brought with it all kinds of colonial contacts. The Lakenhal, as a Leiden city museum, is very interested in this, partly because Leiden's colonial and slavery history has recently been researched and partly because the collection currently focuses heavily on the seventeenth century, while there is also a lot of material available about the more modern period.'
When Marit applied to the museum for a research internship, it quickly became clear that she would be delving into three nineteenth-century sample books from the Leiden cotton factory De Heyder & Co. 'There were many more sample books in the depot containing all the fabrics from the company's collection,' Marit explains, 'but curator Jori Zijlmans and I soon realised that the sample books were the only ones that also contained text. As a historian, they are the ones I prefer.'
All kinds of colonial connections
The sample books provided an overview of all the orders placed with the company. Colonial connections soon became apparent. 'The reason De Heyder & Co was established in Leiden, for example, is colonial,' says Marit. 'The company was originally Belgian, but when the Netherlands and Belgium separated in 1830, Belgium had virtually no opportunity to trade with the Dutch East Indies, while King William I wanted to invest in that large market. That is why De Heyder & Co moved to the Netherlands.'
The tactic worked. One of the companies that placed orders with De Heyder & Co most frequently was NHM (the Netherlands Trading Company). 'That company is more or less the successor to the VOC (the Dutch East India Company). At the time, NHM only had trading houses in the Dutch East Indies,' says Marit. 'So it is very likely that all those orders ended up on the colonial market, also because the NHM had the explicit objective of reviving colonial trade.'
There were also cultural links between the colonial market and De Heyder & Co. Marit: 'A very telling example is batik. Normally, it is a very labour-intensive process in which patterns are applied to fabric using hot wax, and the fabric undergoes up to seven rounds of dyeing, but De Heyder & Co accelerated this process as a kind of early fast fashion. This is a somewhat more fluid connection than actually making money from colonial trade, but it does show how colonial contacts permeated the market everywhere.'
Coming soon
De Lakenhal is pleased with Marit's research because it ties in with the museum's longer-term process of addressing its colonial past. She herself would also like to continue with this type of research. 'As a historian, it's great fun to use historical documents to think about how you can convey a story, while at the same time taking historical reality into account and remaining accurate.' She has now started a thesis related to her internship research. 'I'm interested in the family behind De Heyder & Co, the Driessens. I would like to write a history of their way of thinking. In what context were they operating and how does that fit into history?'
