Through a focus on the leading Dutch imperial shipping lines operating during the inter-war era, Subversive Seas stresses that European imperialism “did not merely exist within the spaces of metropole and colony but rather was a transoceanic and transnational project spanning the globe,” and that maritime imperial systems “both supported and subverted terrestrial empire” (255–256). Indeed, Alexanderson shows that threats to the rust en orde of the Dutch colonial realm emanated from a wider oceanic milieu than merely the Indonesian archipelago—for example, from the Middle East, China, and Japan. Much of Dutch policing and intelligence gathering focused on these wider maritime networks of potential subversion. Dutch shipping companies were intimately involved in these counter-subversion efforts, which also extended to thwart Japanese economic “penetration” of the Netherlands East Indies (nei), especially in the 1930s.
By the interwar period, Dutch shipping lines were in a paradoxical position. They were not...