Visions of Empire in the Nazi-Occupied Netherlands

This book explores how the experiences of World War II shaped and transformed Dutch perceptions of their centuries-old empire. Focusing on the work of leading anti-Nazi resisters, Jennifer L. Foray examines how the war forced a rethinking of colonial practices and relationships. As Dutch resisters planned for a postwar world bearing little resemblance to that of 1940, they envisioned a wide range of possibilities for their empire and its territories, anticipating a newly harmonious relationship between the Netherlands and its most prized colony in the East Indies. Though most of the underground writers and thinkers discussed in this book ultimately supported the idea of a Dutch commonwealth, this structure wouldn't come to pass in the postwar period. The Netherlands instead embarked on a violent decolonization process brought about by wartime conditions in the Netherlands and the East Indies.

1. War comes to the kingdom; 2. The landscape of resistance and the clandestine press; 3. 'Look to the East!' collaboration, colonialism, and compensatory schemes; 4. 'Indies lost, disaster born': the trauma of early 1942; 5. Mutuality, equality, and a Dutch commonwealth: the Queen's speech of December 7, 1942; 6. Countering the commonwealth: the center and right enter the fray; 7. 'After our liberation, that of Indonesia': preparing for battle; 8. Wartime consensus and post-war pressures; Conclusion: the end of an era.

Jennifer L. Foray is an Assistant Professor of History at Purdue University. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. in Modern Western European History from Columbia University and her B.A. in Anthropology from Fordham University. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Grant to the Netherlands, a Foreign Language and Areas Studies fellowship and a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) grant. For the 2010–11 academic year, she served as a Kluge Fellow at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Her teaching and research interests include imperialism and decolonization; social and cultural responses to war and trauma, especially memorialization and commemoration; and the Netherlands. This is her first book.