Imperial Interiors: Dutch Wall Maps in the Domestic Sphere and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Identity in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam
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Authors
Cooper, Brookelnn A.
Date
2025-10-03
Type
thesis
Language
eng
Keyword
Early Modern History , Cartography , Dutch Republic , Amsterdam , Material Culture , Early Modern Globalization , Cosmopolitanism , Identity , Empire and Colonialism
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Abstract
This dissertation investigates the “total image” of Dutch cartographic works, including geographic content, marginal decorations, cartographic silences (deliberate and inadvertent), and textual descriptions, to examine the entanglement of cartography, empire, and identity formation in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. It argues that Dutch wall maps were both products and producers of the Dutch imperial imagination: ideologically charged material artefacts that visualized and legitimized imperial expansion, naturalized racial and social hierarchies, and inscribed the Republic’s global ambitions into both civic and domestic life. This dissertation follows a methodological trajectory from the macro to the micro scale, beginning with global geopolitics, narrowing to Amsterdam’s cityscape, and zooming in once more to its domestic interiors, arguing that the ideological potency of these cartographic images was amplified through the quiet repetition of daily proximity in both public and private spaces. In the domestic sphere, wall maps forged a visual continuum that connected Amsterdam interiors to the wider imperial world, transforming bourgeois households into microcosms of empire. Permeating everyday Dutch life, maps were central to the construction of a sense of ‘Dutchness’ in the nascent Republic, an identity inseparable from its rise as a global commercial and colonial power. This study examines wall maps in relation to the formation of global, national, civic, and individual identities. Particular attention is given to their display in bourgeois households, where maps materialized claims to cosmopolitanism and global participation while simultaneously reaffirming the owners’ privileged place within stratified local and colonial hierarchies. Bridging macro- and micro-historical approaches, this dissertation highlights cartography’s central role in shaping Dutch identities that were at once local and global, domestic and imperial. This dissertation bridges American and Dutch scholarly traditions, addressing a historiographical gap in the study of Dutch cartography: the lack of critical analysis of wall map consumption in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. This approach highlights map consumers as active agents in contributing to a worldview that positioned the Republic as a global imperial power, placed the Dutch atop an imagined civilizational hierarchy, and situated the bourgeoisie of Amsterdam at the apex of the Republic’s internal social order, thereby strengthening and legitimizing their multilayered positionality within intersecting systems of privilege and power.
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