During a recent two-day conference, book authors and academic researchers came together to talk about the role the Netherlands played in slavery.
The “Slavery and the Slave Trade in New Netherland and the Dutch Atlantic World” conference was co-sponsored by the nonprofit New Netherland Institute and held at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture on May 3, and at the New-York Historical Society on May 4. The conference looked at how efforts of the Dutch to play a role in the growth of European trade in the 1600s went on to affect Africans and Indigenous people in the Americas and Asia.
The New Netherland Institute aims to promote awareness about the role the Dutch played in the establishment of New York City and the Americas.
The conference plays a part in the Netherlands’ “Slavery Memorial Year,” which is marking the 150th anniversary of the end of slavery in Suriname and the Dutch Caribbean. The Dutch government is commemorating the Netherlands’ “Slavery Memorial Year” through July 1, 2024.
The Dutch parliament first created the Dutch West India Company in 1621, to combat the economic advances the Spanish and Portuguese were making when they developed trade routes and then enslaved African and Indigenous people in lands bordering both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
It’s been a struggle for the descendants of the enslaved to have Dutch colonial history truly acknowledged in the Netherlands. Conference participants said it’s slowly beginning to be a part of the Dutch collective memory—but too slowly for many historiographers.
Nancy Jouwe, a lecturer from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, talked about how the Dutch created a global empire by participating in the transAtlantic slave trade and enslaving people in Indian Ocean locations. The establishment of the New Netherland colony—which was ceded to the British in 1664––brought Dutch culture and language to this area. It became so entrenched that when the abolitionist Sojourner Truth was born into slavery in New York State more than a century later, Jouwe said, “she was severely punished by one of her owners because she couldn’t speak proper English as a young child because she spoke Dutch until she was nine years old.” Even the yearly celebration of Pinkster, she added “shows how African Americans transformed this Dutch religious observance into a celebration of African cultural traditions during the spring.”
Valika Smeulders, head of the history department at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, spoke of how art helped to normalize the enslavement of Africans in Dutch colonial societies. “The colonial period saw the emergence of a class who liked to display their newly acquired power,” she said. “The international nature of this elite’s power figured prominently in their presentation—the re-presentation of themselves in the world. They could boast about their power and possessions in remote places by having an exotic servant physically present in their homes, and by having this Black servitude committed to canvas.”
For Jennifer Tosch, founder of the Black Heritage Tours, which looks at New York’s Dutch colonial period in Amsterdam (Netherlands) and New York State, this is personal. She has traced and recovered more than 200 years of her family’s history from Suriname, the Netherlands, Scotland, and the United States; she even traced her heritage as far back as to Ghana and the Ivory Coast.
“The experiences of enslaved individuals have been integral in undertaking this economic prosperity we’ve been talking about,” Tosch said. “Enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples have played such a vital role in the building of infrastructure, roads, agriculture—not simple things. They weren’t just transported as cargo; they weren’t just incidental. They came with knowledge, with skills. The colonizers didn’t just capture people that knew nothing.
“And when we talk about planters: Who did the planting? I want us to get back to accessing this ancestral memory, acknowledging the importance of the lived experience.”