Background essays on the rise and fall of the Netherlands' expansionist society, both at home and in its global domain overseas.

This pioneering history of the Dutch Empire provides a new comprehensive overview of Dutch colonial expansion from a comparative and global perspective. It also offers a fascinating window into the early modern societies of Asia, Africa and the Americas through their interactions.

Empires of the Sea brings together studies of maritime empires from the Bronze Age to the Eighteenth Century. The volume aims to establish maritime empires as a category for the (comparative) study of premodern empires, and from a partly ‘non-western’ perspective. The book includes contributions on Mycenaean sea power, Classical Athens, the ancient Thebans, Ptolemaic Egypt, The Genoese Empire, power networks of the Vikings, the medieval Danish Empire, the Baltic empire of Ancien Régime Sweden, the early modern Indian Ocean, the Melaka Empire, the (non-European aspects of the) Portuguese Empire and Dutch East India Company, and the Pirates of Caribbean.

An accessible survey of the history of European overseas empires in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries based on new scholarship In this thematic survey, Gabriel Paquette focuses on the evolution of the Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, and Dutch overseas empires in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He draws on recent advances in the field to examine their development, from efficacious forms of governance to coercive violence. Beginning with a narrative overview of imperial expansion that incorporates recent critiques of older scholarly approaches, Paquette then analyzes the significance of these empires, including their political, economic, and social consequences and legacies. He makes the multifaceted history of Europe’s globe-spanning empires in this crucial period accessible to new readers.

"Dutch overseas expansion in the seventeenth century is a difficult phenomenon for a modern political scientist to explain. In terms of their administrative structure, the long string of Dutch settlements along the coasts of Asia, Africa and America was something between a trading diaspora and an empire. Certainly, Dutch contemporaries themselves neither regarded it as an empire, nor did they feel any sympathies for the very idea of empire. Had they not succeeded in repelling such an empire in a tremendously bloody uprising lasting a staggering eighty years? Their rebellion had been against an imperial tyrant who rode roughshod over their traditional privileges and freedoms"--