The King’s Colonial Men? Re-migrants in Dutch Restoration Politics, 1815-1840
The boundaries between metropole and colony in political careers were fluid. A thriving literature is exploring the development of imperial careers and how they shaped the exchange of political ideas in the British empire during the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly through the figure of the ‘re-migrant’, returning after experience in the colonies. This resulted in a political tradition of MPs claiming to represent the concerns of colonists and commercial interests at Westminster, a process which, as this paper will argue, had its parallels in the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, prime ministers who started their careers in the colonies have attracted the attention of biographers, as has the broader topic of (post)colonial biographies. But what happens if we put political-imperial careers under scrutiny to see how the colonies have also shaped Dutch metropolitan political culture?
Lauren Lauret is a Dutch Research Council (NWO) postdoctoral fellow at University College London, and she is assistant professor of Dutch History at Leiden University. Her research interests include the impact of colonialism on Dutch political practice and how the political elite (re)claimed power after experiencing disruption.
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