Throughout the long history of Dutch empire starting in the early seventeenth century and extending into the postcolonial present, various people both in imperial dependencies across the globe and the metropole have resisted the logics and realities of oppression and exploitation. While colonisers’ perspectives have received plentiful attention, this conference puts the often marginalized voices of resistance in and against Dutch empire front and centre. Drawing on recent trends in the intellectual history of anticolonialism, the conference will chart and discuss the intellectual interventions of actors who agitated against the Dutch empire and its legacies, from the 1600s to the 2020s.

The conference takes place on Wednesday 11, Thursday 12 and Friday 13 September 2024, at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. It is a critical follow-up to the international conference “Visions of Empire in Dutch History”, organized in 2016 at Leiden University, and the resulting edited volume The Dutch Empire Between Ideas and Practice [Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies] (Palgrave, 2019).

Keynote speakers are Marjoleine Kars (MIT) and Lin Hongxuan (NUS).