The Dutch Geographical Society: A Networked New Imperial History, 1873–1914
摘要
This chapter examines the Royal Dutch Geographical Society of Amsterdam (Koninklijk Nederlands Aardrijkskundig Genootschap—KNAG, founded 1873) between its founding and the First World War, from a network perspective inspired by the recently proposed “New Dutch Imperial History”. The aim is to reconstruct the various visions or imaginations of the world produced within the KNAG. The source is the KNAG’s annual Tijdschrift (“Journal”, published from 1876), whose articles have been recorded and coded for this research. After extensively reviewing the historiography on the KNAG and historiographical debates on the Dutch Empire, the chapter conducts a qualitative analysis of the KNAG’s personal and institutional networks. It then proceeds to a quantitative, digitally visualised network analysis of the journal authors and the topics and spaces they addressed in their articles. This analysis shows how the KNAG structured the world thematically and spatially. At the same time, it becomes clear that the society, far from being a unitary actor, consisted of various, multi-scale, and multi-directional networks of people and geographical visions related to the Netherlands, its colonies, and other places. The KNAG used these networks to advance its interests, but the networks also forced it to adapt, for example, to the specific spaces it was dealing with. The chapter thus demonstrates the power of digital network analysis to reveal deeper structures in large sets of empirical historical data. This tool could be a means to implement “New Imperial History”.