This project was awarded a three-year Marie Skłodowska Curie Global Fellowship from the European Commission (2019-2022). From 2019-2021, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia, which is located on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people and at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis.

In 1609, Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius anonymously published his manifesto Mare liberum, which was commissioned by the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Mare liberum argued for a juridical distinction between land-based sovereignty and the “free sea,” heralding a new maritime imagination and international legal order that still persists today. Grotius is not just an exemplary figure for early legal deliberations on maritime worlds, his work carries particular resonance for Dutch articulations of empire and colonialism rooted in oceanic spaces that have shaped its historical and contemporary position in a global context. Conventional land-based accounts of Dutch empire and colonialism simply mention the ocean in passing, often as a route between colony and metropole. This project emerged to addresses this oversight by developing a cultural oceanography of the Dutch maritime imagination, generating an innovative multi-era and interdisciplinary approach to the study of maritime worlds. Applying an oceanic perspective, the project aimed to show how a maritime frame—rather than a land-based frame—engenders new ways of theorizing the formation of (Dutch) empire and colonialism and their intersecting socio-political, legal, environmental, and economic discourses.

The project resulted in several peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and I am currently wrapping up my monograph Contract Colonialism on the work of Dutch humanist and United East India Company lawyer Hugo de Groot (Hugo Grotius), whose writings continue to undergird contemporary international and maritime law and the extractivist imaginaries and practices of global capitalism.

As part of Maritime Imagination, I also created an ongoing series of works on the Dutch slave ship Leusden, including several performance lectures, a video essay, and a book chapter. This ongoing study draws on Black (feminist) studies scholarship on the Middle Passage to examine Dutch regimes of racial terror at sea. On 31 December 1737, the slave ship Leusden shipwrecked off the coast of Suriname. As the ship sank, the captain ordered his crew to lock 664 abducted African peoples aboard into the hold. Although the records tell us this is the largest recorded massacre in the history of the transatlantic slave trade, the mass murder has remained but a footnote in the archive.

For the project, I co-organized the Oceans as Archives series together with Renisa Mawani and Kristie Patricia Flannery. This project brought together artists, scholars, and activists working on oceans from non-Eurocentric critical perspectives. The series has taken on the form of two conferences and the edited collection Oceans as Archives with Routledge (2025).

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