Like other nineteenth-century reform movements in Great Britain and the United States, the vegetarian movement sought to bring about lasting change. It intertwined with other movements as disparate...Show moreLike other nineteenth-century reform movements in Great Britain and the United States, the vegetarian movement sought to bring about lasting change. It intertwined with other movements as disparate as abolitionism on the one hand and eugenics on the other. However, the change it sought was not merely institutional or social. The type of reform vegetarians advocated was at its heart something that progressed on an intimate, individual level. Changing the food one ate meant changing one’s relationship to history, tradition, culture, religion—one’s daily routines, carried out with family, in the intimacy of domestic spaces. But it also involved changes to one’s habits as a consumer, whether that meant sourcing (or creating!) new foods, growing one’s own, or even foraging in the forest for edibles. And since the foods we eat are the building blocks of our embodied selves, vegetarianism represented a fundamental change to the very substance of the human body. Because it intruded deeply into the personal realm, involving the universal daily act of eating, the discourse on eating vegetables was larger than the vegetarian movement itself, touching not only other reform movements, but facets of culture connected to class, gastronomy, colonial ties, gender and religion, to name but a few. A strange feature of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century vegetarianism—given its name—was that in many ways it was more about not eating meat than it was about eating vegetables. It is perhaps for this reason that although vegetarians had plenty to say about the virtues of vegetables, studies of vegetarianism tend to lack nuance when they situate these arguments beside what others were saying about eating vegetables, focusing largely on reactionary statements and missing other strands of discourse around vegetable eating within the mainstream. Therefore, my research takes this wider view, examining British and American vegetarian, vegetable and other cookbooks to situate the vegetarian imperative towards plant-based eating in the context of contemporary attitudes towards vegetables themselves, whether connected to vegetarianism or not.Show less
This thesis examines the entrepreneurial reasons for establishing the Ostend Company (1722-1727) in the context of socio-political developments in the aftermath of the War of the Spanish Succession...Show moreThis thesis examines the entrepreneurial reasons for establishing the Ostend Company (1722-1727) in the context of socio-political developments in the aftermath of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1713). The thesis concludes that the Ostend Company could be established because: internal competition in the Southern Netherlands had to be eliminated to restore profitability of the Chinese tea trade; merchants from the Southern Netherlands could not gain trading concessions in Bengal without the institutional protection of a Company (under the Habsburg Emperor); the Habsburg administration judged that overseas trade was instrumental for the economic development of the Southern Netherlands, in turn strengthening Habsburg authority there; and the Dutch and English threat of waging war against the commercial initiatives in the Southern Netherlands turned out to be a hollow one.Show less
On December 27th 1949, the Netherlands transferred most of the sovereignty to Indonesia after a decolonization-conflict that lasted for more than four years. This meant the end of the Dutch East...Show moreOn December 27th 1949, the Netherlands transferred most of the sovereignty to Indonesia after a decolonization-conflict that lasted for more than four years. This meant the end of the Dutch East Indies. The soldiers of the Royal Dutch Army returned home after having lived under extreme conditions in a country that was completely unlike anything they were used to. Over the decades that followed a large number of publications appeared, many of them informal. In these publications the former Dutch soldiers told stories about their migration to the Dutch East Indies as soldiers, and their return to the Netherlands after their stay of three to four years. For my internship at the KITLV I took stock of some of the published stories as well as of the interviews with former soldiers collected by the KITLV. What struck me was that these stories formed a more or less coherent collective narrative. This narrative shows primarily similarities in descriptions of preparations and expectations of the Dutch East Indies, their experiences in the Dutch East Indies, and returning home after the war. In this thesis I researched several possible explanations why the content of these stories that recall these individual expectations, perceptions and experiences is of such a collective nature.Show less
