Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.' William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 4 Denmark is often omitted from accounts of former European overseas empires, a fate it shares with other European empires, not least the lesser powers, whether in terms of geographical scale or temporal extension, such as the German, the Italian and the Belgian. One typical example of the tendency to omission is Anthony Pagden's otherwise insightful article, 'Fellow Citizens and Imperial Subjects: Conquest

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... nd Sovereignty in Europe's Overseas Empires'. 1 While Pagden's title suggests a survey article of all the European empires, in the end it settles for mentioning only a few, discussing some aspects of the French, but inevitably, like the vast majority of other approaches in English dedicated to Europe's overseas empires, only dealing emphatically with the British. The British was, of course, the most extensive empire by far during the second modernity. 2 The problem lies in the implicit claim to cover the collective European imperial history through the British experience alone. This claim represents not merely an oversight, it quickly becomes an enormously problematic generalisation. Not only did the size and extension of the British empire set it apart from other European empires. The 'culture of empire' produced by its 'contact zones' 3 also differed from those of the other European nation-empires. The warning about misreading the British imperial history as representative of all imperial experience needs to be equally heeded when looking at other imperial contexts. Here, however, the warning relates to the singularity of national imperial experiences, which can become trapped by narratives of singularity. The actuality of this narrow trap is clear from the many national imperial histories producing their imperial experience as governed by an always-