Proposals and War Aims That Didn't Happen Map Thread

That would make sense, but we're talking eighteenth century empire building-minded European Monarchs, small is not typically in their vocabulary.
Well, 19th, and regardless these colonies would look more like Santo Tomás than the Congo Free State. These were conceived as settler colonies, not economic.
 
I imagine this included basically colonies/communities of Belgians, Flemings, or Walloons in general. And I feel we should see your sources on some of these.
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While the list is impressive, there's no much sourcing there, even in the philosophy's essay footnotes you're linking, tough.
I searched a bit, and this is what I found
It mentions Guatemala, New Hebridae, Congo (I mean, of course), Ethiopia, etc. But note that all of these papers are NOT systematically about colonial projects as such : for instance the Compagnie de Colonisation du Guatemala was not about taking over the territory of Guatemala, but a colony in the sense of establishing a litteral settlement of Belgians and Belgian owners there to tie local economies and population to Belgium, as you had settlements of Europeans and Americans in Latin America in the XIXth and XXth

I think there might be a certain...hastiness trying to consider colonies' projects in Florida or India as being litterally the same than what was made in Congo.
 
While the list is impressive, there's no much sourcing there, even in the philosophy's essay footnotes you're linking, tough.
I searched a bit, and this is what I found
It mentions Guatemala, New Hebridae, Congo (I mean, of course), Ethiopia, etc. But note that all of these papers are NOT systematically about colonial projects as such : for instance the Compagnie de Colonisation du Guatemala was not about taking over the territory of Guatemala, but a colony in the sense of establishing a litteral settlement of Belgians and Belgian owners there to tie local economies and population to Belgium, as you had settlements of Europeans and Americans in Latin America in the XIXth and XXth

I think there might be a certain...hastiness trying to consider colonies' projects in Florida or India as being litterally the same than what was made in Congo.
Well yes, that's true. I just wanted to make a map that shows all the places that Belgium wanted and considered. Even if they weren't finalized ideas, the idea of them is fascinatingly bizarre
 
Thing is, it's less Belgium as such (Belgium had a certain anti-colonial stress during most of the XIXth, partially coming from the ideal of neutrality among the population) than various companies, individual prospects, or even brief mentions of "hey, wouldn't a colony look cool there?" in official accunts collected by a Leopold II going cold turkey on its colonial addiction.
 
IIRC there's a paper from the University of Texas that talks about Leopold I's colonial ambitions, though it focuses on four projects in particular (off the top of my head I can only recall Santo Tomás, some project to buy up large tracts of the southern Amazon from Brazil and Paraguay, and I think something in Guinea)
 
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