>> Makes me wonder how much the author himself learned about the Dutch East India Company. I suspect very little, if anything. Something about these exercises reminds me of junk food: empty calories and all that...

> Surely more than if they read nothing at all because most of it would be tedious drudgery of minimal value.

It's an archive. It's all "tedious drudgery" until you figure out the value.

Sometimes figuring out the value means reading things until notice something, which could be a pattern or something dispersed.