Comparing Governance of Diversity in the Dutch, English, and Portuguese Empires

Governance of diversity in the Dutch empire will be compared to the Portuguese and English experiences of varying degrees of inclusion and exclusion. The choice for these two pointers is that the Portuguese provide the general matrix for the European maritime and colonization overseas, while the English initiated what was to become the British transition from colonialism into imperialism. In this process, diversity was the most important challenge these empires had to face and the way they governed their subjects, visitors and foreigners determine, in the long run, the consistency and longevity of empire, while it deeply influenced the way mechanisms of inclusion (citizenship for example) and exclusion (racism, xenophobia and so on) were transposed into metropolitan and ex-colonial societies.