Oceanic decolonization provides imperial historians with a powerful tool in reconceptualizing modern empires by interrogating archival materials “against the grain” of terrestrial norms. First, the oceanic world complicates established metropole-colony relationships by moving the metropole to the margin and instead focusing on the “interconstitutive networks” connecting colonial Indonesia with littoral peripheries around the globe. Second, incorporating transoceanic empire into twentieth-century historiography exposes a myriad of global actors who engaged with and were influenced by the Dutch Empire, helping provide a voice for the “other” hidden within colonial archives. Third, transoceanic analyses require historians to complicate colonial and business archives by challenging the narratives hegemonic colonial institutions tell about themselves and exposing everyday acts of resistance within systems of oppression. Subversive Seas illuminates both the regulatory aspects of terrestrial worlds and transgressive aspects of oceanic worlds – ultimately exposing the multifaceted, chaotic, and complex ways these worlds overlapped, mingled, and collided.