Visions of Dutch Empire: Towards a Long-Term Global Perspective

What were the major developments in thinking about Dutch empire from the early modern period to the twenty-first century? What moral, political, legal and economic arguments have been put forth to justify, criticize or reform empire? How and under what circumstances did these visions and arguments change or remain the same? This article outlines a research agenda that addresses these questions. It argues for an approach that includes a long-term perspective from the early modern period to the postcolonial situation, which sees ‘Dutch’ history broadly, moving beyond national borders, and instead explicitly informed by influences and actors from across the globe. This implies a transnational and transimperial approach that can highlight these global connections as well as tensions; and finally, an approach that understands intellectual history as going beyond the big names of systemic thinkers, and includes visions of empire as negotiated in (day-to-day) practice.History and International Relation

Introduction. Intellectual history in imperial practice

The introduction asks where the Dutch empire fits in the intellectual history of empire. It explains the need to examine the trope of Dutch exceptionalism over the long term in transnational and transimperial perspectives. Methodologically it argues for including meaningful practices as sources and to look beyond systemic thinkers and examine how ‘intermediate thinkers of empire’ from across the globe articulated their visions in practice. Drawing on the concepts of upward and downward hermeneutics, this entails examining the interactions between ideas and practice; how ideas formed and were formed by socio-cultural and political practice. Such a history of visions of empire sheds new light on historiography and public debate, precisely because dominant notions within these are rooted in the intellectual history of Dutch imperial practice.NWO275-52-015History and International RelationsColonial and Global HistoryCities, Migration and Global Interdependenc

An HDG Method for Dirichlet Boundary Control of Convection Dominated Diffusion PDE

We first propose a hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin (HDG) method to approximate the solution of a \emph{convection dominated} Dirichlet boundary control problem. Dirichlet boundary control problems and convection dominated problems are each very challenging numerically due to solutions with low regularity and sharp layers, respectively. Although there are some numerical analysis works in the literature on \emph{diffusion dominated} convection diffusion Dirichlet boundary control problems, we are not aware of any existing numerical analysis works for convection dominated boundary control problems. Moreover, the existing numerical analysis techniques for convection dominated PDEs are not directly applicable for the Dirichlet boundary control problem because of the low regularity solutions. In this work, we obtain an optimal a priori error estimate for the control under some conditions on the domain and the desired state. We also present some numerical experiments to illustrate the performance of the HDG method for convection dominated Dirichlet boundary control problems

Mind, absent characters, and the deployment of ideology in Henry James’s short fiction

This paper examines the role of ideology in the construction of absent characters in Henry James’s short fiction against a methodological background of cognitive narratology and the attendant notions of metarepresentation, extended mind, and distributed identity. Building on the conviction that those minds that communally assemble absent characters by projecting subjective images of them do form identifiable ideological systems rather than arbitrary arrays, an approach to the construction of absent Louisa Brash in “The Beldonald Holbein” (1901) is made in the context of “Daisy Miller” (1878), “The Author of Beltraffio” (1884), and “The Next Time” (1895). Published in three different decades, these stories display absent and quasi‐absent characters who are conjured up for the reader in much the same way as Mrs. Brash is, namely as functions of a priori ideological positions based on sequenced degrees of commitment to the thematic dominant of a tale, a process that often results in deeply conflicted identities.US Fulbright Program/Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sport, Grant/Award Number: PRX16/00265