Playing empire at home: Het Beursspel and Dutch popular colonial geopolitics in the 1940s

Abstract

How is the geopolitical imaginary of colonial spaces produced in popular culture? This question is at the heart of this contribution which seeks to analyse how board games, as a popular culture artefact, are a venue to research the modes by which such spaces are not only represented but also 'at play’. Games are a window to people's geopolitical imaginaries and practices not only through games' representations and imaginaries, but also their level of embeddedness and acceptance. Our article focuses on the social semiotics of a Dutch board game commercialised in the early 1940s – Het Beursspel [The Stock-Exchange Game] – and how its visuality and gameplay helps us to bring to the fore a central aspect of the still very little-known Dutch people's representations and engagements about the Dutch empire. The ‘empire at home’ was strongly internalized and taken-for-granted as a natural extension of the Netherlands as part of an imperial globalised political economy, even in a time when the Netherlands itself and its ‘Oost’ (contemporary Indonesia) were occupied by the Axis forces.