This book provides a comprehensive account of Dutch history in the "long" nineteenth century. In this fascinating and instructive period the country saw extremely rapid population growth, awesome death rates, staggering fertility, some of the fastest economic growth in the world, a uniquely large and efficient service sector, a vast and profitable overseas empire, and relative tolerance. This is the only single-authored book currently available on this crucial period of Dutch history, and it will be of central importance to Dutch specialists, as well as European historians more generally.

The pervading theme of this book is the construction and allocation of identity, especially through images and imagery. The essays analyse how the dominant social discourses and imageries construct identity or assign subject positions in relation to the categories of race, nation, region, gender and language. The volume is designed to inform the study of those categories in cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, gender studies, literary studies, philosophy and history. Its coverage is geographically global, multidisciplinary, and theoretically eclectic, but also accessible. The authors...

This book is a major study of visual representations of Europe, from the classical world to the present day, in maps, icons, the arts and graphic images of all kinds. Europe has been variously represented as the demi-goddess Europa, a bull, a horse, a son of Noah, a Magus, a queen, and the Empress of the World. This richly illustrated book charts how these visualizations of the continent have altered over time; how they interact with changing ideas of the extent and nature of Europe in relation to the other continents; and how these images have influenced and been influenced by the 'reality'...