This contribution considers the representation of Ukraine in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. At the time, the lands and peoples of Ukraine were already the subject of numerous newspaper reports, pamphlets, poems, and maps, often produced in Amsterdam. The presentation offers several ‘imagological’ lines of inquiry that should be seen as work in progress, based on PhD research into early modern Dutch-Polish mutual perceptions.
Ukraine was often discussed in the context of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which many Dutch writers represented as a crucial grain supplier. In their writings, Ukraine sometimes features as an integral part of this realm, but sometimes as a distinctly separate entity. In particular, this applies to texts about Kossack Uprisings, like the one led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky. At the same time, Amsterdam saw the production of various maps depicting Ukrainian individuals. Regularly, however, these were indistinguishable from Polish figures, showing that the differences between these peoples were not very clear to the Dutch – or not that important.