Colony, Metropole, and the Ocean in Between

Abstract

Abstract Kris Alexanderson’s Subversive Seas showcases the worth of combining thorough archival research with critical literary reading techniques. Her research brings new vigor to subfields of history with a penchant for antiquarianism, like Dutch maritime history, but it also prompts questions regarding the direction of new imperial history. Alexanderson’s history of Dutch imperial shipping lines fits a number of historiographical trends, most importantly the ‘archival turn’ in histories of empire, but also reminds us of some of the limits of ‘reading along the archival grain’, as anticolonial voices are sometimes simply absent or muffled in colonial archives.