Defence date: 11 October 2019 ; Examining Board: Prof Jorge Flores, European University Institute, (Supervisor); Prof Lucy Riall, European University Institute; Prof Marieke Bloembergen, Leiden University; Dr Mark Frost, University of Essex ; This thesis examines the development and transformation of mid-nineteenth-century colonialism on Dutch Java and the British colonies of Ceylon and the Straits Settlements through a carefully contextualized, critical analysis of the corpus of popular colonial travel writing published on these areas in Dutch and English in the period. The analysis is undertaken on two levels: on the one hand, through a close reading of a body of about twenty travel books and the representation of colonial societies therein; and on the other, through a consideration of the concrete changes that were taking place on the ground and the corresponding debates within communities and on the pages of the colonial press. What emerges from the exercise is a significant double movement in nineteenthcentury imperialism, whereby an influx of European newcomers – settlers, officials, soldiers etc. that moved into the region in order to take advantage of the opportunities offered by rapid administrative and territorial expansion – disrupted the pre-existing norms and habits of established colonial elites; and, while doing so, employed the genre of popular travel writing as a tool to firmly establish and legitimise the new conception of empire they represented on a cultural level. The genre, seemingly frivolous but in fact intensely political, deliberately employed the characteristics of the tourist culture then fashionable in Europe in order to transpose metropolitan cultural and social norms on colonial life, doing away with the tropes of imperial adventure and tropical exoticism prevalent in the travel writing of the preceding decades. The analysis focuses specifically on how this new mode of colonial leisure related to and modified understandings of three themes: the so-called social and cultural ...