Starting from 18th and 19th century texts based on « colonial projects » by members of the Dutch administration or high ranking officers in the colonial army, and anchored on the concept of « engineering society », the author endeavors, through numerous examples from the diverse Dutch colonies, to discern the means which were considered at the time to strengthen the connection between the mother country and its colonies from the political, economic, but also, moral, perspectives. These debates, as the author demonstrates, were also bound up in the discussions concerning the passage from a colonial economy of exchanges to new modes of economic exploitation based, for the most part, on free labor. These projects, shrouded in philosophic and moral discourse of the Enlightenment, are signifiers of this transitional period between 1770 and 1830 in the community of European colonial capitals.