Expansion in History – serie

Based upon a sweeping command of Dutch East India Company (VOC) primary sources, Knaap’s manuscript offers a thought-provoking thematic examination and chronological survey of the Dutch Republic’s overseas and colonial expansion in Asia and South Africa, mainly through the VOC and its successors, the Batavian Republic, the Kingdom of Holland and Franco-Dutch Java, over a period of more than two centuries, 1596-1811. It elucidates and deals with several conceptual and theoretical issues that are intrinsically important and germane to a polity’s definition of and how it chooses to execute the process of expansion overseas in the early modern period. One of this work’s major arguments and contributions is its advocacy that the Dutch VOC’s expansion in Asia was an imperial project and must be seen as an act of empire, or, at the very minimum, the attempt to construct one via the innovative utilization of a highly organized and dynamic commercial institution with significant political and diplomatic power and naval and military resources.

This book examines the vision of maritime and colonial expansion developed by the Maritime and Colonial League, Poland’s second largest mass organization in the interwar period. It focuses on how the League aspired to transform Poland from a land into a maritime nation, from backward and marginal to modern and central; to create "a new, pioneering type of Pole, conqueror of seas and oceans, mosquitos and malaria (…) building bridges, taming waterfalls and carrying high the banner in the name of Poland” (Michał Pankiewicz in Morze, September 1936). Through active presence in the colonial world and by exercising power over it, Poland was to overcome its internal problems and become a modern power with global presence, on equal terms with its Western European neighbors.