Slavery and Dutch Colonies 

Slavery is as old as organized human societies. It started more than 10,000 years ago, with the rise of socially stratified societies and was to be found in all continents. In a large part of Europe, slavery and comparable forms of servitude were common up to the 16th century. This was also the case in the first colonizing countries: Spain and Portugal. Under Islamic (Moorish) rule in Iberia (from the 8th to the 15th century) there was slavery, and the Moors also held black Africans as slaves. Slavery continued after Christian reconquests in Spain and Portugal. Maritime-oriented Portugal also traded in and used African slaves in the Eastern Atlantic since the 14th century.

 

A Balinese and Papuan female slave of the Raja of Buleleng (Northern Bali), 1865 (source: KITLV collection, signature nr. 4393)

Slavery  in the (Dutch) Caribbean
When Columbus discovered America in the name of Spain in 1492, the Spaniards encountered native Amerindians which they enslaved to work, in mining gold and otherwise. They were overworked and along with the diseases the Spanish and Portuguese brought from the Old World, this led to the decimation of Amerindians, and even depopulation of certain parts. The Spanish priest Bartholomew De Las Casas criticized the cruel Spanish treatment of Amerindians and proposed importing African slaves as supposedly stronger replacements. The first African slaves, initially from Spain itself, were brought in as early as 1501 in what is now the Dominican Republic. The English, French, and Dutch in time tried to profit from the American territories as well, for instance through state-sanctioned piracy and conquest of Spanish and Portuguese territories or islands. Dutch captain Piet Heyn captured the large Spanish silver fleet near Cuba in 1628, providing the Dutch state with funds to invade and eventually conquer a large part of Portuguese Brazil. This became Dutch Brazil (1630-1654), and eventually meant a shift in the Dutch focus on slavery. Like the Portuguese before them the Dutch employed Amerindians as slaves and also (imported) Africans. In the process slave-based plantation agriculture was modernized in Dutch Brazil, with international repercussions. Modernized and intensified sugar plantations also developed – partly under Dutch-Brazilian influence - in the British colony Barbados and later Jamaica and other Caribbean colonies. These and other islands/colonies became plantation-dominated. These larger-scale sugar - and coffee - plantations increased the need for slave labourers.

In the later Dutch colony Suriname, taken over from the British in 1667, many such plantations were set up and African slaves were imported. The Caribbean islands in Dutch possession, like Curaçao and Aruba, were for climatological reasons less suitable for plantations, but they also played an important role in slavery, as Curaçao was a major entrepot for the slave trade.

The conditions for slaves were very harsh; slaves were at the bottom of society and treated as chattel rather than humans. They were ”socially dead”. There were some gradations, however, as some powers, such as Spain and France, had relatively more laws protecting slaves and giving them a few rights. These were on the other hand also often ignored by slave owners. Sources at the time claimed that the slavery regime in Suriname was exceptionally cruel, such as in punishments. Some historians now question this, pointing at relatively few differences between international slavery regimes. Conditions were generally harsh, exemplified by the fact that in most colonies in the Caribbean region more slaves died than were born, and life expectancy of Africans in e.g. Jamaica, Haiti or Suriname, after arrival, was often no more than 6 years, necessitating more slave imports. Also, throughout all colonies slaves repeatedly tried to rebel or escape, and those who succeeded founded maroon communities of escaped slaves, such as in the interior of Suriname. Comparable maroon communities arose in Jamaica and Eastern Cuba.

 
Drawing from 1850 of a sugar mill, part of a plantation, in Suriname (source: collection KITLV, signature nr. 36C353)

Plantation-based slavery continued to thrive in Suriname, along with neighbouring parts of current-day Guyana (also Dutch officially until 1815). According to some historians the profitability for the Dutch state of slave-based plantations had diminished strongly by the early 19th century. It continued nonetheless until 1863, the year that the Netherlands abolished slavery in its colonies in the West. Later than some other powers, as the British abolished slavery for instance in 1833, and France in 1848. The slave trade was abolished officially a time before this, although illegal trade continued.

The Dutch brought slaves destined for their colonies from various parts of Africa. The Dutch held for a long time a trading fort/base at Elmina on the Ghanaian coast. Slaves from what is now Ghana were due to this numerous, though not predominant. High percentages of the slaves in Suriname also came from the Fon Ewe region around Benin and from the Angola/Congo region. This is still noticeable in African cultural and linguistic survivals in present-day Suriname as well as Curaçao.

A recent estimate is that the Dutch transported overall a total of more than half a million African slaves to the Americas. Less than larger powers as Portugal and Britain, but still representing a shameful period of cynical trade in and (ab)use of human beings in Dutch history. This past has according to many not received due attention in Dutch historiography or education, although this attention increased recently. This is symbolized by the inauguration of the slavery monument in the Oosterpark in Amsterdam in 2001.

Desenkadena monument in Curaçao, revealed in 1998, recalling the slave rebellion led by Tula in 1795 (source: collection KITLV, signature nr. 41791)

Slavery  in the (Netherlands) East Indies
The subject of slavery in the East Indies is not nearly as well-known as its counterpart in the Caribbean, and has only in recent decades begun to attract attention. In fact, however, slavery and other forms of unfree labour have a long and sad history in Indonesia and other Southeast Asian societies, both in pre-colonial and colonial times. However, rather than forming the heart of a plantation economy as was the case in the West Indies, slavery in the Dutch possessions in Asia was mainly associated with coastal trade centres, as a source of labour for foreign traders, as well as a status symbol for local elites. The Dutch, who arrived in the Indonesian archipelago in the early 17th century, participated in and interacted with existing Indian Ocean slave trade networks. While the Dutch East Indonesian Trading Company (VOC) initially tended to import slaves from other coastal parts of Asia, such as the Malabar and Coromandel coasts of India, and to some extent from Madagascar and East Africa, from the 1660s onwards the majority of the slave population originated from various regions of the Indonesian archipelago.

Male and female slaves from the household of Raja Umbu Timba of Napu (Central Sumba). Photo by G.P. Rouffaer, 1910 (source: KITLV collection, signature nr. 503703).

While slavery was hereditary, low reproductive rates among the slave population necessitated constant replenishment of the supply of unfree labour by purchasing slaves. The VOC acquired most of its slaves through a network of Chinese, European and Eurasian traders who were in turn supplied by indigenous traders, particularly Balinese and Buginese (since Bali and Makassar both functioned as major entrepots for the slave trade, these ethnic groups were strongly represented among slave traders as well as slaves).

Although the major indigenous states, for instance in Java, did generally not enslave their native populations, smaller states and stateless societies with insufficient means of supporting a rapidly increasing population regularly exported their demographic surplus as slaves. Apart from the Balinese and Buginese, typical target groups for slavers in Southeast Asia included the Dayak of Kalimantan, the Batak of Sumatra, the Toraja of Sulawesi, the Alfuru of Maluku, the various peoples of the Lesser Sunda Islands (Nusa Tenggara), and the Papua of New Guinea, as well as similarly vulnerable groups in the Philippines and the Malay Peninsula. For a significant number of Southeast Asian coastal communities, piracy and slave raiding formed an integral part of the local economic system. Indigenous tribal societies often enslaved their war captives, or their people were enslaved by stronger neighbouring states, such as the sultanates of Aceh, Palembang, Johore (in present-day Malaysia), Goa, Ternate, and Tidore. Some indigenous societies, such as the Toraja, had hereditary slave castes. Slavery could also result from judicial punishment or debt bondage.

In 17th- and 18th-century Batavia and other VOC-dominated towns, a multi-ethnic group of slaves tended to make up a significant part of the urban population (about 40 per cent being typical). The majority of slaves in the Dutch East Indies worked as domestic servants in households with fewer than 10 slaves on average, although some masters owned 50 or more slaves. Others, particularly 'Company slaves' owned and employed by the VOC, performed a wide range of tasks, for instance in the construction of buildings and public works, at the docks and shipyards, as agricultural hands for growing food or cash crops, as industrial laborers (for instance in the many sugar mills in the Environs of Batavia), in administrative capacities, or as traders. The Banda Islands were an exception as significant amounts of slave labour were employed on its nutmeg plantations. Company slaves could also end up in other VOC trading posts, for instance in Ceylon or the Cape Colony.

Manumission of slaves gave rise to communities of freedmen, such as the Portuguese-speaking, Christianized 'Mardijkers' of mainly South Asian extraction. Although slavery was socially accepted, permitted by law, and often rationalized with reference to quasi-Christian arguments, some colonial slave owners, perhaps aware of the uneasy relationship between slave ownership and Christian values, manumitted their slaves when they reached a certain age, or arranged for them to be freed after their master's death. A well-known example is the case of Cornelis Chastelein, who had stipulated in his will the manumission of all his Christian slaves after his death (in 1714) and allowed them to form their own community in Depok in present-day Jakarta. Not infrequently, manumitted slaves at some point became slave owners or traders themselves.

Although Dutch law formally provided a measure of protection against maltreatment, in practice abuse of slaves was all too common. Willem van Hogendorp's 1779 stage play Kraspoekol (lit. 'hitting hard') was a plea, ahead of its time in a number of respects, for better treatment of slaves. Although large-scale slave uprisings were virtually absent in the East Indies, individual outbursts of violence or poisoning of slave owners, as well as other indirect forms of resistance, were fairly common. Bands of runaway slaves roamed the hinterlands of many slave-holding urban centres.

The slave trade was banned by Lieutenant-Governor Raffles during the British interregnum in the region (1811-1815), and henceforth remained illegal. The slave population dwindled to a fraction of its former size until slavery was finally abolished in 1860. In practice, however, this did not end the existence of slavery in the Indonesian archipelago. Illegal slave trade still took place, and indigenous slavery continued in areas that were not yet under direct control of the colonial state.

Relevant websites on slavery
NTR, Slavernij: (Dutch) television programme on slavery: five weekly episodes, starting September 18th, 2011 (also in cooperation with the KITLV). See: http://deslavernij.ntr.nl

UNESCO’s Slave Route Project. See: http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/themes/dialogue/the-slave-route/

The Trans-Atlantic slave trade database. See: http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces

NINSEE: National Institute for the Study of Dutch Slavery and its Legacy. See: http://www.ninsee.nl/

Wikipedia article on the history of slavery world wide. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery

Literature list 

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