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Between 1806 and 1810, Napoleon’s younger brother Louis Bonaparte (1778–1846) reigned as King of Holland, a kingdom that encompassed the northern part of the present-day Netherlands.1 Unhappy with the Dutch commitment to the French imperial cause, Napoleon established the Kingdom of Holland by appointing his brother Louis as king on 5 June 1806. This move shocked the revolutionary Batavian Republic (a république sœur), which had been formed by the Netherlands in the previous decade.Apart from political-theoretical objections to hereditary power, no historical precedent existed for the Kingdom of Holland. Following his ascension to the throne, Louis was not instantly accepted by the Batavian Republic and would go on to face issues of legitimacy throughout his entire reign.2 In this article, I will focus on an instrument of cultural propaganda which Louis used to assert his authority, namely the periodical Le Vrai Hollandais.Louis Bonaparte’s policies cannot be separated from his family history. When Corsica declared formal secession from France in 1793, forcing the Bonapartes to flee, Louis was only fourteen years old and barely educated. Napoleon decided to raise Louis himself and train him as a soldier. Although Louis studied the philosophes and learned French, mathematics and geography from his brother, he never completed his education as he had to accompany Napoleon on his military campaigns in Italy.

During the Age of Revolutions, the Dutch colonial world changed fundamentally. An early modern system of trading settlements gave way to modern colonies. During the Napoleonic period, the British takeover of Dutch Asian colonies marked the beginning of a profoundly intertwined British-Dutch colonial world that emerged in Asia. Thus, empire-building and identity-building in this Asian sphere were a transnational process. A second, related, historiographical trend is the attention paid to travelling officials as part of empire-building, both in Commonwealth history and more recently in post-Napoleonic history. Studying individuals’ mobility can deepen the understanding of the dynamics within colonial empires.