The Oranje family, from which today’s Dutch monarchy descends, was directly involved in controlling the overseas colonies, which included the slave trade. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the ancestors of King Wilhelm of the Netherlands earned the equivalent of 545 million euros from dividends from trading in sugar, cocoa, tobacco, cotton and coffee. This is an underestimate of the research commissioned by the Dutch government on the role of the state in the colonial era and its legacy. The study concludes that the former Dutch Republic deliberately exploited people in its global expansion, both in Suriname (South America) and the former Netherlands Antilles in the Caribbean, as well as in Indonesia. July 1st marks the 150th anniversary of Emancipation and a response from the ruler is expected during the ceremony called Keti Koti. Last December, Prime Minister Mark Rutte apologized for slavery, calling it a crime against humanity.
The study, published this Thursday under the title “Staat en Slavernij” (State and Slavery), underlines that both the governors – the nobles who represented the Dutch provinces – and the predecessors of the current monarch on the throne achieved a comparable economic advantage some dividends. They were paid at the time by the companies that dominated colonial trade: the East India Company (VOC, in the Dutch acronym) and the West India Company (WOC). Roughly speaking, the first covered what is now Indonesia and Sri Lanka, as well as South Africa. The other dealt with North America, Suriname, Brazil and the Caribbean. “The governors and the predecessors of the royal family who sit on the throne today received large sums of money from both companies. Later, in the 18th century, they came out of the Opium Trading Society. And their private interests in the economic activities of the colonies have yet to be explored,” explains Matthias van Rossum, senior researcher at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam (IISH).
The expert is one of four historians commissioned by the government to compile the work of fifty colleagues. He adds that the role of the orange in the 19th-century agricultural system has not yet been fully explored. “As heads of state, and no longer technically enslaved, but with forced labor and low-paid labor demanded of all colonizers, they were shareholders in the companies that traded in the products thus obtained.” Slavery was declared in Suriname and the Caribbean in 1863 abolished. However, over the next decade, former slaves in Suriname were forced to work in appalling conditions. Their owners were compensated by the metropolis, but through the ten years of hard labor they did not lose the investment that buying people involved. Although July 1st marks the 160th anniversary of the abolition of slavery, it is believed that 150 years have passed since actual liberation. The VOC transported between 660,000 and 1.1 million slaves. According to calculations from May 2021, the number of WOC in the slavery collection organized by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has increased to around 600,000.
The recently presented study questions the Netherlands’ self-image. The independence of the Dutch Republic was recognized in 1648 after the Eighty Years’ War – the War of Flanders – against its then ruler Philip II of Spain. “The official version emphasizes liberation from political slavery, but this new work shows that this was just a formula for internal consumption. From the outset, the new republic deliberately based its colonial power on slavery,” says Van Rossum. He also says that the Dutch chronicles relied on the idea that he traveled for trade. “Along the way, the political and commercial elites encountered and were drawn into slavery; This study refutes that approach.” In his opinion, although colonialism and slavery are a pan-European process, with different countries competing with each other at different historical stages, the debate about their consequences does not yet have a European public character.
Slaves working on Dutch plantations in an engraving by geographer and publisher Pieter van der Aa (1659-1733).getty
This chapter of history is on the secondary school curriculum in the Netherlands and in recent years more attention has been paid to events in Asia and the Atlantic. In any case, in the student’s material, “the image of merchants continues to prevail over that of the colonial empire, and there is little analysis of the legacy of slavery in the 19th and 20th centuries,” says Van Rossum.
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The United Kingdom is one of the countries that has studied this part of its past most thoroughly and has a large body of critical work. In light of the study’s conclusions, Dutch Home Secretary Hanke Bruins Slot has sent a letter to Parliament admitting that they are harsh and provocative about the state’s involvement in slavery “from local authorities to churches” that is everything should have been told beforehand.” Several Dutch provinces have already analyzed their colonial role and apologized. Amsterdam, Delft, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht have done so.
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