Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- List of Abbreviations
- On Names and Terminology
- Introduction: The Still Waters of Empire Run Deep
- 1 Food and Indifference: A Cultural History of the Rijsttafel in the Netherlands
- 2 Indonesians and Cultural Citizenship: The Metropolitan Microcosm of Empire
- 3 Schools and Propaganda: History Books and Schools as Sites of Imperial Campaigns
- 4 Scouting and the Racialized Other: Imperial Tropes in the Dutch Scouting Movement
- 5 Missionary Organizations and the Metropolitan Public: The ‘Inner Mission’ and the Invention of Mission Festivals
- Conclusion: A Fragmented Empire
- Sources
- Index
Introduction: The Still Waters of Empire Run Deep
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 May 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- List of Abbreviations
- On Names and Terminology
- Introduction: The Still Waters of Empire Run Deep
- 1 Food and Indifference: A Cultural History of the Rijsttafel in the Netherlands
- 2 Indonesians and Cultural Citizenship: The Metropolitan Microcosm of Empire
- 3 Schools and Propaganda: History Books and Schools as Sites of Imperial Campaigns
- 4 Scouting and the Racialized Other: Imperial Tropes in the Dutch Scouting Movement
- 5 Missionary Organizations and the Metropolitan Public: The ‘Inner Mission’ and the Invention of Mission Festivals
- Conclusion: A Fragmented Empire
- Sources
- Index
Summary
Abstract
One of the main paradoxes of metropolitan imperial culture in the Netherlands is the widely held assumption that most people were indifferent to the colonies, while, simultaneously, the opposite image arises from the various engagements with empire throughout civil society. Previous studies have interpreted popular imperialism in the metropole as a phenomenon that came in waves, with heightened jingoist moods in one moment interspersed by indifference in another. Here, I argue that ‘indifference’ to the Dutch Empire should be studied in a new key: not as the absence of the enthusiasm for empire we can detect at some moments, but as a paradoxically active stance towards empire. To stay aloof from empire at certain moments was in line with an imperial ideology that saw the metropole as the centre that dictated the pace for colony and metropole alike.
Keywords: popular imperialism, historiography, decolonization
During the heyday of the modern Dutch Empire, colonial affairs could be vigorously debated in the Dutch press on one day, and be virtually forgotten the day after. It is this fundamental ambiguity in the position of the Dutch Empire in the life and society in the metropole that is the subject of this study. This ambiguity had much to do with the fact that the metropole was (and is) as often seen as part of the empire as it is not. Sometimes the connection between metropole and colony was all too obvious, for instance, when Dutch audiences read reports in their newspapers about the colonial wars that were waged in their name and when colonial military veterans were celebrated at home. At other times, a lack of enthusiasm ‘from below’ led various commentators to complain about the public's ‘lukewarm indifference’ to empire. Yet, the ambiguity when it comes to the perceived role of empire in Dutch society is not just a story of presences and absences, but also one of contradictions within single moments. The commentators who complained about imperial indifference are a case in point: they sought attention for colonial affairs in newspapers and other periodicals, and clearly felt a natural entitlement to take up that space, while at the same time their laments about a lack of attention to colonial affairs was based on the premise that it was, to their regret, not a natural thing to devote that much attention to such matters.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A Metropolitan History of the Dutch EmpirePopular Imperialism in the Netherlands, 1850-1940, pp. 13 - 36Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2022