Event Title
What History Teaches Us About Corporate and Political Intrigue
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Location
Biology Building, Room 101
Start Date
24-1-2019 6:00 PM
End Date
24-1-2019 7:00 PM
Description
During the two decades after World War I, Dutch imperialism in Southeast Asia was challenged not only in the terrestrial realm of co-lonial Indonesia, but also across transoceanic spaces connecting metropole and colony. A variety of passengers, maritime workers, re-ligious pilgrims, and other migrants utilized the world’s oceans as a space to contest colonial hegemony and spread anti-colonial ideas such as pan-Islamism, Communism, and pan-Asianism between distant port cities. Dutch shipping companies and the colonial government collab¬orated in global policing and surveillance projects in an attempt to control their transoceanic empire and maintain imperial hegemony be¬yond the colony’s terrestrial borders. This lecture reveals how shipping businesses were vital not only to the economic and logistic prosperity of Dutch empire, but also for protecting it against both foreign and indigenous socio-cultural threats to Dutch authority. Interwar Dutch shipping companies have largely escaped critical analysis over the ways colonial culture influenced their business decisions, but this presentation shows how they felt the same fears and paranoia as the colonial governments during the 1920s and 30s.
What History Teaches Us About Corporate and Political Intrigue
Biology Building, Room 101
During the two decades after World War I, Dutch imperialism in Southeast Asia was challenged not only in the terrestrial realm of co-lonial Indonesia, but also across transoceanic spaces connecting metropole and colony. A variety of passengers, maritime workers, re-ligious pilgrims, and other migrants utilized the world’s oceans as a space to contest colonial hegemony and spread anti-colonial ideas such as pan-Islamism, Communism, and pan-Asianism between distant port cities. Dutch shipping companies and the colonial government collab¬orated in global policing and surveillance projects in an attempt to control their transoceanic empire and maintain imperial hegemony be¬yond the colony’s terrestrial borders. This lecture reveals how shipping businesses were vital not only to the economic and logistic prosperity of Dutch empire, but also for protecting it against both foreign and indigenous socio-cultural threats to Dutch authority. Interwar Dutch shipping companies have largely escaped critical analysis over the ways colonial culture influenced their business decisions, but this presentation shows how they felt the same fears and paranoia as the colonial governments during the 1920s and 30s.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Alexanderson is an Assistant Professor in the History Department, where she teaches courses in world history, maritime history, film history, and the history of sci¬ence and technology. She received her Ph.D. from Rutgers University with an emphasis on European and global/comparative his¬tory. Prior to joining Pacific in 2013, she was an Assistant Teaching Professor at Drexel University and was a Fulbright IIE scholar to the Netherlands. Her first book, Subversive Seas: Anti-Colonial Politics Across the Twentieth Century Dutch Empire, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2019. Her work has been published in the Journal of Social History, Journal of Early Modern History, Journal of Pacific History, Journal of Military History, and a forthcoming edited collection titled Colonialism, China and the Chinese: Amidst Empires, under contract with Routledge.