Emmer, C., the Dutch Slave Trade, 1500-1850, Translated by Chris Emery, (New York: 2006), 166P

Emmer, C., The Dutch Slave Trade, 1500-1850, translated by Chris Emery, (New York: 2006), 166p.

Although the first overview of the Dutch slave trade in English was by J. M. Postman in 1990, The Dutch and the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600-1815, it is Piet Emmer, Professor of European Expansion and Migration at Leiden University, who has done more than anyone else to bring the subject to the attention of the Dutch public. Emmer PhD dissertation of 1974 was on the subject and he has published widely on the topic since then. From the 1980s until the present he has been a participant in a wide-ranging international debate on the comparative history of the European slave trade. The years before the centenary of the abolition of the British slave trade in 2007 produced a great deal of public discussion about the subject on both sides of the Atlantic. In the Netherlands it was Emmer’s book aimed at a general audience, published in Dutch in 2000, that first brought the topic to public notice and, indeed, brought forth a good deal of public controversy since Emmer’s argument that the slave trade was not very profitable for the Netherlands was seen as not politically correct. Emmer’s unfortunate statement that the amount of space allotted to slaves on Dutch Atlantic slave ships was similar to the space occupied by people in coach class on a 747 did not help the book’s public reception. Nonetheless, the book is an excellent scholarly introduction to the Dutch slave trade rooted in archival scholarship and has the added attraction of treating the Dutch trade in a comparative perspective.

Compared to the English, French, Spanish and Portuguese slave trade, the Dutch slave trade constituted only in about 5 to 6% of the whole. The Dutch involvement in the trade began in the 1630s with the shipment of slaves to Dutch Brazil from Angola and the Guinea coast. The peak of the Dutch slave trade came in the middle of the 17th century, when the Dutch played a crucial role in the development and expansion of sugar plantations in the West Indies. From then until 1713, the Dutch concentrated on supplying the Spanish Americas with slaves through their colony in Curaçao. The Dutch played a smaller, but still significant, role in the trade until the crisis of the plantation economies in the Guyanas during the 1770s greatly diminished their participation until it nearly ended by 1800. When the Kingdom of the Netherlands was created in 1814, near the end of the Napoleonic wars, the Dutch formally agreed to end their participation in the slave trade at Britain’s insistence.

Emmer systematically explains the origin of the Dutch slave trade; its impact upon Africa; the Dutch slave forts in Africa; the slave voyages and why the casualties on these voyages were almost twice as high than on English slave ships; the Dutch planation system in Brazil, the West Indies, and in Surinam (Dutch Guyana); the Dutch slave revolts: the illegal, but small, Dutch slave trade in the 19th century; possible reasons for its late abolition in 1863; and the use of Asian contract labor in the Dutch West Indies in the late 19th century. He tackles two of the major questions about the slave trade. How profitable was it for the Dutch and how important was it to the Dutch economy. He argues that the slave trade’s profitability is difficult to assess since there is very little good documentation available. There are surviving records for only one of the slave trading companies in the 18th century and this shows a modest profit of 2 to 3% per annum. He points out that the trade was on the average a loss-maker for the two Dutch West Indies companies. If the trade was not very profitable, he asks, did the Netherlands as a whole benefit economically from “this inhuman trade?” He suggests that, while it undoubtedly produced some profits for those who conducted the trade and for the planters who bought the slaves, the entire Dutch planation economy in the West Indies was only a small part of the Dutch economy and, in any case, most of the slaves carried by the Dutch were supplied to foreign colonies. He concludes that “for the vast majority of the Dutch enjoyed very limited benefits from the slave trade, and then only indirectly. Without it, coffee and sugar would merely have been more expensive” (p.110).

Emmer’s concluding chapter contains a fascinating and thoughtful discussion of Dutch moral guilt about its participation in the slave trade, the West Indian plantation system and its late abolition of slavery. The latter topic is particularly interesting in a comparative perspective since its slave trade had almost entirely ended by 1800, its stake in the American plantation system was comparatively rather small by that date, and yet there was virtually no abolitionist movement in the Netherlands before the Dutch government abolished slavery in its West Indian colonies in 1863. For a good earlier comparative discussion of the Dutch abolition of slavery, see Seymour Drescher, “The Long Goodbye: Dutch Capitalism and anti-slavery in a Comparative Perspective,” American Historical Review 99 (Feb. 1994): 44-69. See also a collection of essays on Dutch slavery edited by Emmer, The Dutch in the Atlantic Economy, 1580-1880: Trade, Slavery and Emancipation (1998).