Tracing Colonial Discourse in Dutch Historical Newspapers

The expansion of colonialism often involves categorisations of colonised people based on their race, language, social status, and perceived level of “civilisation”. While such categorisations may seem fixed, the language used to describe colonised populations is dynamic, shifting in meaning and connotation as colonial relationships and power structures change over time. We investigate diachronic semantic changes in Dutch colonial terminology through newspaper articles from 1860 to 1960 using word embeddings. This period witnessed major colonial expansion, the implementation of “ethical imperialism” (the Dutch “Ethical Policy” promoting education and welfare while maintaining colonial control), and eventual decolonisation. We combine computational semantic change detection with a more fine-grained analysis of the associated adjectives, demonstrating how the combination of distant and closer techniques can reveal patterns of linguistic transformation that reflect broader societal and political changes in Dutch colonial discourse.