Introduction

Gijs Dreijer ()
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Gijs Dreijer: Erasmus University Rotterdam

Chapter Chapter 1 in Private Entrepreneurship and European Imperialism, 2026, pp 1-29 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract This chapter introduces the main historiographical and theoretical frameworks of the study, as well as the approach, sources and structure. The chapter first introduces the case study of Dutch entrepreneurs from the port city of Rotterdam, positing the research question: why and how they operated in Africa rather than within the Dutch empire? The chapter situates the story of the Dutch entrepreneurs within the larger historical trends, such as European imperialism and the ‘Scramble for Africa’, nineteenth-century globalisation and the rise of Rotterdam as Europe’s pre-eminent port city. Subsequently, the introduction argues, based on an extensive historiographical survey, for an economic interpretation of imperialism, more specifically based on the concept of ‘gentlemanly imperialism’. This approach is combined with newer approaches from the New Imperial History (NIH), which aims to lay bare connections between and within empires. Finally, the chapter explains the conceptualisation of entrepreneurship in this group, opting for an application of the New Entrepreneurial History which looks at three entrepreneurial processes of (1) envisioning and valuing opportunities, (2) allocating and reconfiguring resources and (3) legitimising novelty, combined with novel ideas of accumulative learning within a network of entrepreneurs.

Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palscp:978-3-032-01086-5_1

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-032-01086-5_1

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