The library will be closed for external visitors the whole month of August. The academic staff will be back at the KNIR from 1 September.
22 July 2025
Introducing the Starling On March 6, 1890, a bird-loving New Yorker named Eugene Schieffelin (1827-1906) released a crate containing a hundred European starlings into Manhattan’s Central Park. His goal? Writing fifty-eight years later, in 1948, the naturalist...
17 July 2025
What is the rationale of settler colonialism? For Cornelis Chastelein, a senior VOC official in the Dutch colony of Batavia, the answer was simple. “It is well known,” he stated in 1705 (Chastelein 1885, 63), “that colonies or plantations come into being and...
17 July 2025
This welcome collection of essays extends the scope of current analyses of settler colonialism as a distinct mode of domination. It does so in multiple directions: it considers the ancient world, which has been largely neglected by settler colonial studies, it...
17 July 2025
This piece makes two useful comparisons that help to shed light on and generate new questions about Dutch colonial history. In the first instance, it seeks to connect two, perhaps underrepresented, projects of colonial expansion on Dutch soil, that of the...
17 July 2025
Building on the article “Settler Colonial Studies: A Historical Analysis” and on the ensuing exchange between this author and Ikuko Asaka, Antoinette Burton, and Sidney Lu in the journal Settler Colonial Studies (Schayegh 2024a and b; Lu 2024; Asaka 2024;...
17 July 2025
I have been working in the field of Indigenous American history for a long time but have engaged with the concept of settler colonialism less readily than many of my peers. Initially I shared James H. Merrell’s critique that confining settlers to colonists...
