The 2025 Erasmus Lectures: "The Early Modern Making of the Refugee: Pillars of the Dutch Empire"
Date and Time
Location
Pillars of the Dutch Empire
Historians have often portrayed refugees as marginalized victims of modernizing states, yet in the early modern world they also played a formative role in building those very states. This lecture argues that the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic depended heavily on displaced minorities to advance its military, maritime, and colonial ambitions. By examining the reciprocal relationship between governments and dispersed communities, it reveals how the recognition of refugee status could serve both confessional regimes and imperial expansion.
The 2025 Erasmus Lectures in the History and Civilization of The Netherlands and Flanders, Harvard University.
Speaker: Geert Janssen, University of Amsterdam.
Sponsors: Erasmus Lectureship in the History and Civilization of The Netherlands and Flanders and the Early Modern Workshop in the Department of History, Harvard University.