Dutch Imperialism Research Articles

‘A Newspaper War’?: Dutch Information Networks during the South African War (1899-1902)

The South African War (1899-1902) caused a stir in the Netherlands. The Dutch public overwhelmingly supported the Boers in their struggle against the British. To support the ‘kinsmen’ in South Africa several organisations in the Netherlands embarked on an international propaganda campaign. This article considers the involvement of Dutch journalists in the pro-Boer agitation. They were confronted with a dilemma because as a small country the Netherlands officially was neutral and did not possess strong international lines of communications, which made it difficult to distribute information in other countries. This problem raised moral and practical questions about the Dutch press and its position in the world. Using concepts from the historiography on the media of the British Empire, Kuitenbrouwer analyses the Dutch press system around 1900. This article is part of the special issue 'A New Dutch Imperial History'.

Representing Distant Victims: The Emergence of an Ethical Movement in Dutch Colonial Politics, 1840-1880

This article attempts to add to our understanding of the relations between the Netherlands and its colonies in the little researched period of 1840-1880 when this relation became politicised. This was a direct result of a new notion of citizenship that developed after the 1848 constitution was implemented: many believed that citizens had now become accountable for government policies, that is, as far as they were acquainted with the effects these had abroad. Colonial issues were among the first for which citizens developed new protest forms and demanded that public opinion should be taken more seriously by the government. This means that not only what happened in the colonies influenced the shape and structure of Dutch politics in an important formative stage, but also that sentiments usually connected to the introduction of the Ethical Policy can be traced back much earlier than is often assumed. This article is part of the special issue 'A New Dutch Imperial History' and was nominated for the first Low Countries History Award in 2016 (for the best article in BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review over the years 2013-2014-2015).

A Swiss Village in the Dutch Tropics: The Limitations of Empire-Centred Approaches to the Early Modern Atlantic World

This article considers what the migration circuits to and from Suriname can tell us about Dutch early modern colonisation in the Atlantic world. Did the Dutch have an Atlantic empire that can be studied by treating it as an integrated space, as suggested by New Imperial Historians, or did colonisation rely on circuits outside Dutch control, stretching beyond its imperial space? An empire-centred approach has dominated the study of Suriname’s history and has largely glossed over the routes taken by European migrants to and from the colony. When the empirecentred perspective is transcended it becomes possible to see that colonists arrived in Suriname from a range of different places around the Atlantic and the European hinterland. The article takes an Atlantic or global perspective to demonstrate the choices available to colonists and the networks through which they moved. This article is part of the special issue 'A New Dutch Imperial History'.

Geographies of Difference: Dutch Physical Anthropology in the Colonies and the Netherlands, ca. 1900-1940

This article analyses how physical anthropologists created scientific circuits between the Netherlands and their colonies in the East Indies. It shows that national and imperial anthropology were not two separate spheres and that the movement of anthropologists and their objects was important both for the making of anthropology as a scientific discipline and for making anthropological ideas. Trying to define the physical features of people in Dutch fishing villages and in East Indies inland regions, anthropologists formed geographies of imaginary difference. Anthropological data from the Indies however was valued more highly than that from the Netherlands, which means that distance continued to matter. New Imperial Historians would therefore do better to sharpen their perception of these uneven geographies. This article is part of the special issue 'A New Dutch Imperial History'.

A Wind of Change on Java’s Ruined Temples: Archaeological Activities, Imperial Circuits and Heritage Awareness in Java and the Netherlands (1800-1850)

This article focuses on early archaeological activities on Java between 1800 and 1850 in the context of the multiple regime changes of that period. It engages with the New Imperial History’s network-centred approach by looking at circuits of archaeological knowledge gathering in which not empire, but Java’s ruined Hindu and Buddhist temple sites provide ‘the nodal points’. By tracing how people, objects and ideas travelled via these sites, and between the Netherlands and the colony, the article aims to understand the origins and nature of heritage awareness of the modern colonial state. It argues that this archaeological site-centred approach helps us understand how both European concepts and indigenous appropriations of archaeological sites contributed to the development of heritage awareness. There were complex multilayered power-hierarchies at work at these sites and forms of indigenous agency that we might miss if we follow only empire-centred networks. This article is part of the special issue 'A New Dutch Imperial History'.

A New Dutch Imperial History?: Perambulations in a Prospective Field

This article discusses the recent developments in imperial history in Great Britain and France and analyses the state of Dutch research in the light of these new approaches. Raben concentrates on three broadly defined topics – the webbed character of colonial spaces, the impact of empire on metropolitan societies and the moral ramifications of colonial empires. The way imperial histories are written is determined by the experiences with ‘empire’ in the metropolitan countries. Despite essential differences in imperial circumstances in and of the Netherlands, Dutch historiography could be inspired by the British and French developments to explore the spatial, cultural and moral relationships between the various parts of the Dutch colonial world. This article is part of the special issue 'A New Dutch Imperial History'.

A New Dutch Imperial History: Connecting Dutch and Overseas Pasts

This introduction is part of the special issue 'A New Dutch Imperial History'.

Sumatran Sultanate and Colonial State: Jambi and the Rise of Dutch Imperialism, 1830–1907. By Elsbeth Locher-Scholten. Translated from the Dutch by Beverley Jackson. Ithaca, N.Y.: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University2004. 332 pp. $31.00 (paper).

Sumatran Sultanate and Colonial State: Jambi and the Rise of Dutch Imperialism, 1830–1907. By Elsbeth Locher-Scholten. Translated from the Dutch by Beverley Jackson. Ithaca, N.Y.: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University2004. 332 pp. $31.00 (paper). - Volume 67 Issue 1

Book Note. Sumatran sultanate and colonial state: Jambi and the rise of Dutch imperialism, 1830–1907. By ELSBETH LOCHER-SCHOLTEN. Translated by BEVERLEY JACKSON. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, Southeast Asia Program, 2004. Pp. 332. Maps, Photographs, Notes, Appendices, Bibliography.

Book Note. <i>Sumatran sultanate and colonial state: Jambi and the rise of Dutch imperialism, 1830–1907</i>. By ELSBETH LOCHER-SCHOLTEN. Translated by BEVERLEY JACKSON. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, Southeast Asia Program, 2004. Pp. 332. Maps, Photographs, Notes, Appendices, Bibliography.

Hugo Grotius in Context: Van Heemskerck's Capture of the Santa Catarina and its Justification in De Jure Praedae (1604-1606)

This article reconstructs Jacob van Heemskerck's second voyage to the East Indies and his capture of the Portuguese merchantman Santa Catarina on 25 February 1603. It incorporates important new archival evidence like Van Heemskerck's letter to the directors of the Dutch East India Company of 27 August 1603, and the original text of the verdict of the Amsterdam Admiralty Court, which confiscated the Santa Catarina on 4 September 1604. It has long been known that the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) wrote De Jure Praedae in defense of the ship's seizure and at the explicit request of the directors of the Dutch East India Company. Historians have failed to recognise, however, that Grotius' conceptualisation of natural rights and natural law in De Jure Praedae is based to a large extent on Van Heemskerck's own justification of privateering. A key notion of Grotius' rights theories - the individual's right to punish transgressors of the natural law in the absence of an independent and effective judge - follows logically from Van Heemskerck's reasoned decision to assault the Santa Catarina in revenge for Portuguese mistreatment of Dutch merchants in the East Indies. As shown by recent work in international relations theory - notably Edward Keene's Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Politics (Keene, 2002) - the natural law and natural rights theories that Grotius formulated in De Jure Praedae cannot be divorced from Dutch imperialism and colonialism in the early modern period.

Capitalism and Imperialism: Britain and the Netherlands

In their impressive new study on British imperialism, Cain and Hopkins mention ‘the desultory negotiations sharing out the Dutch and Portuguese empires should they collapse’ between Britain and Germany at the turn of the century. In the corresponding note, however, they substantiate only the well known negotiations on the Portuguese empire and not those mysterious talks on the Dutch empire. It is one of only a few instances where Cain's and Hopkins’ 2,500 well-documented footnotes do not fully explain their 850 pages of thick description and analysis. Their suggestion of an Anglo-German understanding to divide the Dutch East Indies if necessary, however, does strike some raw nerves among Dutch contemporaries. In the official and unofficial minds of Dutch imperialism, there was a strong fear that die Netherlands could lose their large colonial empire to the great powers. In that case the Netherlands would be reduced to the ‘rank of Denmark’, to a ‘farm at the North Sea’. But this imperial fear was connected with the high hopes that the Netherlands could indeed become the ‘first among the nations of the second rank’, a real middle power, because of its vast colonial empire.

IV. British and Dutch Imperialism: A Comparison

The words that serve as a motto for this paper are taken from the finest novel about Dutch fin de siècle society and indeed, in my opinion, the finest novel in Dutch literature, Louis Couperus' De Boeken der Kleine Zielen (The Books of the Small Souls). They form part of a dialogue between the widow of a former Governor-General of the Netherlands Indies and her, obviously, very dis-appointed grandson, a young colonial civil servant in the beginning of his career.

The giant that was a dwarf, or the strange history of Dutch imperialism

(1988). The giant that was a dwarf, or the strange history of Dutch imperialism. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History: Vol. 16, Theory and Practice in the History of European Expansion Overseas: Essays in Honour of Roland Robinson, pp. 58-70.