Trustee of the Netherlands Antilles: A History of Money, Banking and the Economy, with Special Reference to the Central Bank Van de Nederlandse Antillen 1828-6 February-1978

Soest, Jaap van, Trustee of the Netherlands Antilles: A History of Money, Banking and the Economy, with Special Reference to the Central Bank Van de Nederlandse Antillen 1828-6 February-1978, Curaçao, 1978.

Reviewed by Dr. Thomas Mathews in The Hispanic American Historical Review, (1979) 59 (1).

Dr. Jaap van Soest was attached to the History Department of the University of the Netherlands Antilles at Curaçao. The following was machine-translated from Jaap van Soest Data Collection, University of Curaçao: “Between 1972 and 1980 I collected the research data that was processed in Oil as water: The Curacao economy in the first half of the twentieth century (Curacao 1976, Zutphen 1977), in Trustee of the Netherlands Antilles. A history of money, banking and the economy with special reference to the central Bank of the Netherlands Antilles 1828 – 6 February – 1978 (Curacao 1978, Zutphen 1978), and in smaller publications and articles. This data contained many figures, whether or not in series. They mainly concerned the period 1828 -1955; only a few reached beyond those limits. At a time when few researchers used computers, all those numbers were written down manually - a monk's work that can only be compared with the work that came after the turn of the century was necessary to convert all those notes into a digitally accessible form. In total, in this collection now contains 178 tables with a total of 2091 series of numbers. Some series are special because of their length or detail, others show (sometimes large) gaps. The gaps may be due to lack of source material; in a series from 1830 to 1960, for example, no climate data are available for the period 1861-1894. There may also have been a change in the system of working or reporting, as is often the case with the banks. But gaps can also due to the limited time available for the study. In the latter case, thirty years later, no attempts were made to add the series to fill. I would like to invite every user of this material to complete it, so that gradually an increasing corpus of research data becomes available for general usage. With a view to such a future expansion, the tables with double numbers numbered. Unless otherwise stated, the figures are derived from annual reports, such as those published by the governor annually to the Minister of the Colonies (here referred to simply as Colonial Report, even though it was renamed later); appeared with the Colonial Report no statistical appendices between 1939 and 1943. Furthermore, there are the reports that local companies made for their owners locally or their superiors in the Netherlands. Insofar as these reports or figures are not publicly available, the rightholders receive permission to disclose. A detailed account of the sources can be found in Oil as water pags. 666-675, and additionally in Trustee pages XI and 374.