The webinar was organized on October 12, 2023, with the occasion of the 160 anniversary of the Emancipation in the Netherlands and the Emancipation Proclamation in the US, by Dr. Damian Alan Pargas – Professor of American history at Leiden University, as well as the Director of the Roosevelt Institute for the American Studies in Netherlands, in partnership with Wilemijn Keizer – Executive Director of the American-Netherlands Foundation, Maureen Bunyan – broadcast news pioneer and champion for equity and diversity in Journalism, Dr. Manisha Sinha – Draper Chair in American History, University of Connecticut, and Dr. Coen van Galen – Associate professor – Department of History, Art History and Classics Researcher – Radboud Institute for Culture and History.
Questions and Answers:
Maureen Bunyan (MB): Manisha, we would like to ask you to talk with us for about ten minutes about your field, and what you have learned that relates to the anniversaries of the Emancipation Proclamations in the Netherlands and the US.
For Dr. Manisha Sinha (MS), the main points when talking about slave emancipation in US and the Netherlands are the slaves’ resistance and the need for us to understand emancipation as a process, not just as an event, a process unfolding through the state. She also emphasizes the contestation that went around emancipation, with plantation owners trying to preserve their lucrative economies based on slave labor. The British get rid of slavery also as a state sanctioned process, very similar to the Dutch, while in the US, immediate emancipation happens because of a war-time emergency, and because an anti-slavery party is in power and most of the enslavers have left the Union. Her conclusion to this question is that: “It is not as if these things happened in the past, emancipation took place, and everything was settled. In the US, it is a long history of contestation, one that you could say continues even today, and that is true also of the Netherlands, and Europe as a whole. Slavery flourished with empire and I want to make that clear as a last conclusion, that many times, especially in the British case, people see empire as an extension of British abolitionism. And I strongly argue against that, because even though abolitionism was used as an excuse to acquire colonies in Africa, that is something that is done by the state government, the nation-state, and we must distinguish between them and those who were truly abolitionists, who truly dreamed of abolition and democracy, of an interracial, multi-racial democracy, and the most important actors in that were enslaved people, after that freed people, who made these claims on the nation-state. “
She supported her talk with two outlines:
EMANCIPATION AS PROCESS, 1863-1873
*Lincoln’s support for the Argentinian Republic, 1862
*Emancipation Proclamation, 1863
*Dutch Emancipation, 1863
*Morant Bay Rebellion, 1865
*Overthrow of French and Spanish in Mexico and the Dominican Republic, 1866-1867
*American Reconstruction, 1866-1867
*Cuban War for Independence
*Free Womb Laws in Cuba and Brazil, 1870-1871
*Abolition in Puerto Rico, 1873
*Complete Emancipation in Dutch Caribbean, 1873
*Overthrow of American Reconstruction, 1877-1890
*Abolition in Cuba, 1886
*Abolition in Brazil, 1888
and
FROM SLAVERY TO EMPIRE
*1890s: The crucial decade
*1882: Chinese Exclusion Act
*1890: Mississippi Plan
*1890: Wounded Knee Massacre
*1896: Plessy v. Ferguson
*1898: Spanish-Cuban-American War
*1898: Wilmington Cup and Massacre
*1898: Annexation of Hawaii
*1899-1902: Philippine-American War
For Dr. Coen van Galen (CVG) the process of abolition is a world-wide phenomenon, and the Dutch are slow in the uptake. The Dutch colonies are different in terms of the type of land and the size of the plantations: Suriname is more or less a traditional plantation colony with large sugar plantations, coffee plantations, cotton; Curaçao has hardly any big plantations and a far drier land, and St. Marteen is like Suriname, but on a small scale, with very limited groups of people. In terms of the number/ percentage of free people vs enslaved: around 1860 – Suriname – 52,000 people living there, 2/3 of them still enslaved; Curaçao – Antilles – 32,000 – 32% still enslaved. On the Caribbean Islands, the majority was free, but the difference is quite extensive between the islands: Curaçao – 20% enslaved, Aruba – 20% enslaved, St. Marteen – majority enslaved. Emancipation there was very much based on the idea of keeping people in place, keeping people working. Bigger plantations in Suriname had clear voice in these politics. Planters wanted a population who still worked for them after abolition, they wanted compensation for abolition, they wanted indentured labor. Abolition was presented to them as a sort of gift from the Dutch King. In Suriname, a lot of formerly enslaved people resented the idea that slavery could be re-introduced at a certain time and they realized that they needed some governing power here, that is, lands. Therefore, they formed groups that worked together to gather lands over time, they bought up their own plantations. In Curaçao there was hardly any free land available. So, the former slave owners tried to force people into contracts with them, but on a different scale than in Suriname. They organized a type of sharecropping, meaning people were forced to work for them, which in some places lasted far into the 20th century, even after 1950. In Aruba, the small population of enslaved people would be easily integrated in free communities that already existed. They received lands and within two generations they intermarried with former free population to the extent that there is this idea that there was hardly any slavery at all. In the Long Islands, slavery diminished in importance after 1848, because when France abolished slavery, slavery was no longer viable in St. Marteen. Thus, people were not free, but they were not really enslaved, they went to compete for jobs. In Suriname the contract labor still existed in the 1930s, while slavery was not important anymore. Only after 1976, when Suriname became independent, and lot of people actually came to the Netherlands, people in the Netherlands and Europe realized that slavery was still famous, influenced the lives chances for people from the Antilles and Suriname. In 2023, the Dutch government issued formal apologies for the past slavery in the Dutch West Indies.
MB: My family is from Guyana, so I am curious, I realize that the Eastern part of Guiana was also under Dutch control for almost 200 years, and the area called Berbice is now part of the nation/ Republic of Guyana. Were the same conditions at work there as were at work in the rest of the Dutch Caribbean?
For Dr. Coen van Galen, Guyana was taken over by the British in the Napoleonic Wars, around 1840 and remained within the British Empire. Slavery was abolished in 1844, and it was followed by a period of apprenticeship. Abolition on Guyana had a lot of influence on the situation in Suriname, because after 1824 Guyana was a viable place to go to from Suriname. People fled from Suriname to Guyana. Even plantation owners in Guyana tried to support/ help people from Suriname come to Guyana, so that there was no longer profitable slavery in Suriname.
MB: The slave trade was conducted by both the United States and the European nations. However, the actual enslavement of people did not take place on the European continent. The enslavement of people took place on this continent, in the USA. So, for Europeans at the time of the emancipation, I assume they had a different experience, a different feeling about abolition, about slavery, than Americans did. Because Europeans did not live next to people of color from Africa, they did not deal with them in their day-to-day interaction, and they did not know, obviously, we did not have the communication systems that we do today. European people as a whole did not know what was being done in their names in the colonies of their countries. Americans lived, so to speak, side by side with enslaved people, with Africans, with people of African descent. And they saw and knew, some of them, most of them, how these people lived, what some of the problems were, of course, what impact they had on American society, on the Anglo-Saxon white society. What conclusions can we draw about the fact that Europeans did not see and live with enslavement? How did that affect the movement towards Emancipation?
MS: Great question, Maureen, because, it is true that slavery in the Americas, at least in the European colonies, emerged with the colonization of the Americas, so it is part of the empire. And for many Europeans, the enslavement of Africans was something that was in the colonies, away from them, while in the US, when they became independent especially, and during the American Revolution, most of the Northern states abolished slavery, many times the kind of gradual emancipation laws that were implemented in Cuba and Brazil – you had a nation that was half slave, and half free, and connection between these, in one political system, in one nation-state, was immediate and proximal. So, when enslaved people ran away, they searched for free areas, they ran to the North, to areas that were free soil, and where they could contest their enslavement, or at least demand some protection under Northern laws of freedom that the laws of slavery denied them. But it would be an overstatement to say the Europeans did not know anything about was happening in the colonies. In the British case, especially, which I am familiar with, there is contestation, in Britain, in the 18th century, whether Britain should respect these laws of slavery. Because English common law as such did not have a law on slavery. Europe had gotten rid of servitude and serfdom, serfs had run to cities to win their freedom, just as enslaved people would do later on. Many enslaved people actually even made their way all the way to Britain. So, there was a substantial free Black population there. And there were people in Britain, ordinary people, who benefited from colonial slavery and empire. So, there was sentiment for slavery and empire linked to notions of national greatness. And the idea of slavery went quite well with notions of monarchy. And they would even refer to Rome and other antiquity, as this being part of the Western heritage. Southern slaveholders in the US evoke that history. But this was contested by abolitionism, in Britain, in the Somerset Case in 1772 and in France at the same time, enslaved people being brought in from French India, and from the French colonies. And in the laws they established what we would call “the freedom principle” for their own nation. So, the conceit was that “our nation is free.” But in fact, their riches, their economy, their society were very much dependent on slave-grown objects. Whether it was cotton, sugar, coffee, it was consumed, these were the first goods that created the world market. So, early capitalism is very linked with the emergence of slavery and the slave trade. In Britain, we know that the insurance industry, the banking industry, were completely complicit with the trade in human beings and with the growth of human bondage in the Americas. So, it was very easy as an excuse to say, ‘Oh, our country is free, and this is something that happens over there,’ but these were very interlinked in a global market for cash crops being grown in the Americas. These were the reasons why these countries have empires in the first place. It is because of the profitability and it is encouraged by European states, by European monarchs – the King of England, the Duke of York was on the Board of the Royal African Company that traded enslaved people. This was not a side show, it was very much part of their national political economies. I think for many Europeans, thinking that this is an American problem that they do not know about and should not be connected to, may not be historically accurate.
CVG: Of course, people in Europe knew that slavery existed. But in the Netherlands itself, slavery had always been somewhat ambivalent. At least in Europe itself, slavery was not an option, was not acceptable. At the same time, this also kept people away from Europe. So, there were hardly any enslaved people coming in. People knew what was happening, but the abolitionist movement in the Netherlands was very reluctant in the 19th century, and the colonies were seen as a way to bring wealth to the nation. Their perspective was of Netherlands as a small white country in Europe with a large empire. Nowadays, there is an emancipation movement among people from Suriname and Antillean descent in the Netherlands. I think they have really made great strides and developments – they were Dutch, but not accepted as such because of skin color.
MB: How do you help people understand the impact, the legacy of the period in history that we have been talking about, in the 1800s, the emancipation process, both by the Europeans and by the US? And I know this is a huge open-ended question, but what are the points that you feel are most salient to helping people understand the legacy of slavery and emancipation that we all share today?
MS: That is a big question, especially since we have so many movements today, against unfree labor, the abuse of labor and human traffic. These are old issues that lead to command real labor of people and deny their rights and have them produce goods for our consumption. We do not think about it today, but I think that is an ongoing problem. And you can see this even with emancipation. Once slavery has ended, European countries in their colonies experiment with different kinds of unfree labor in order to produce those same goods on which they depend and on which their nation’s glory depends. You can see this happening even with the slave trade initially, you know how the control of the African slave trade in which nearly 12 million people are transported to the Americas, goes from the Iberian Peninsula to the Dutch and West Indies and then to the French and then to the English. You can literally trace the history of capitalism through who controls the slave trade. This is a profitable business, and then having those people live in conditions of slavery and later on what was known as “coolie labor” or “indentured servitude” and other kinds of unfree labor that Europeans and the Dutch experimented in both the East Indies and the West Indies, show us that the real need was for those profits, those crops being produced, for those goods being produced, and that is a question that we are still living today, on the demands of human rights and democracy, and the demands of profitability, in capitalism, in what we are comfortable with. We do not want to think about how our sneakers may be used in child labor somewhere, the chocolate that we are consuming is grown by unfree labor in cocoa plantations somewhere. We as historians can see those connections quite easily at present.
MB: Coen, tell us about similarities, if there was any, between the abolitionist movement in the US and the abolitionist movement in the Netherlands. Were they the same? Did the abolitionists in the two countries communicate? Did they have the same motivations?
CVG: The abolitionist movement in the Netherlands was rather limited. It was a small group of people and it was influenced by examples from England and America. For example, the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the Netherlands made an enormous impression because then people started to realize that there was really something going on there. Of course, they knew that slavery existed. At the same time, there are these stories from the plantation owners who lived in the Netherlands- ‘we treat our people well, and they have a good living and we give them housing and food, so no worries about their situation.’ But later on, people realized that something was going on there. The abolition was an elitist movement.
MB: Today, in the US, we have a society that has been incredibly influenced by the legacy of slavery. In the Netherlands, of course, the Netherlands is coming to grips with its legacy. What do you think should be the next steps in understanding the legacies and in “righting the wrongs,” or should there be? Is that part of the legacy, to “right the wrongs”? And, of course, I am referring to the question of “reparatory justice.” How is that seen in the Netherlands? Is that a question that people are pondering in the Netherlands?
CVG: In the Dutch Caribbean there is this feeling that there should be some justice for their situation. But also, I think, more equality, because people living in the Dutch Caribbean today, although they are Dutch and they have Dutch passports, they are still not seen as equal to the Dutch people living in Europe. This is something we really have to work on. At the same time, descendants from Suriname and Antillean people in the Netherlands nowadays are fighting to get a serious position, an equal position, but skin color holds them back. There is this ‘Black Piets,’ a sort of racist correctitude in the Netherlands that helps people get to grips with this idea that being Dutch does not mean you have to be white. It means you have this passport and you speak Dutch properly. This needs more developments ,especially concerning people in the Antilles as equal to the people in Europe.
MS: We have notions of citizenship that can be very exclusionary and restrictive and that is why the American experiment with Reconstruction is so important, whether that was a great democratic experiment of interracial democracy. And its fall I think really was a global defeat because everyone thought that this was simply not possible, and you ended up with European nations experimenting with unfree labor, with empire, in ways that were really undemocratic and did not live up to their own professed ideals. I think today we really need to think about interracial democracies everywhere. You look at all the fights and the wars that take place, wars of imperialism, wars of ethnicity, religion, land, and nationhood. Unless we get out of that 19th century mindset that the nation constitutes one race, one people, one language, one religion, that is the kind of idea that fueled and gave rise to Fascism in Europe, unfortunately. We need to learn a lot about inter-racialism today. I think a lot of people in Europe are extremely upset: ‘Why are these people coming here? Why can they not just stay in their own countries?’ They forget the histories of European empires, when Europeans went to other places and colonized these areas and lived there, and that history cannot be undone. I do think most nations need to go beyond paroquial notions of who constitutes a citizen. And in that sense, I think the French have something to teach us. People say that the US was the first country that gave free people equal political and civil rights on Emancipation. Not true. The French Second Republic did it, in 1848, because they have just as long a tradition of rights and republicanism, and I think those are the ideals that we need to embrace today as we build an interracial democracy in each of these areas. And these are lessons not just for Europe. They are for the whole world, I think.
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Questions from the public:
How many enslaved people were living in Curaçao around 1830?
CVG: According to the Dutch colonial government, there were 5,908 enslaved persons in Curaçao in 1830. On July 1, 1863, when slavery was abolished, their number was 6,751.
MS: Compare this to over two millions in the US South in 1830 and four millions in 1860.
I am wondering about the crossover period between British abolition and US/Dutch abolition (1830s-1860s) and how this impacted labor policies in regions such as the Pacific, Dutch Indonesia, and the Australian colonies where these three places interacted to a degree?
CVG: In the Dutch case, abolition in the Dutch colonies was very much influenced by the British example. The British had occupied the Dutch colonies during the Napoleonic wars (1804-1815) and returned Suriname and the Dutch Caribbean islands in 1815 on condition that the Dutch would comply with the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade (which was abolished in the British territories in 1807). The Dutch and English also set up an international court in Paramaribo, Suriname, to prosecute illegal international slave trade. After the abolition of slavery in the British colonies, the British pressured the Dutch to do the same, both in the West-Indies and in Indonesia. The Dutch government could not totally ignore this pressure, because Britain was the maritime superpower of the 19th century and the Netherlands needed British support to keep its colonies. On the other hand, the British also promoted the use of contract laborers from India as a substitute for slave labor. They were sent from India to British, French and Dutch colonies all over the world. More than 30,000 laborers from India went to Suriname.
MS: The Dutch emancipation process was very similar to the British, with a long period of an intermediate state between slavery and complete freedom. The British also transported indentured labor from India throughout their empire after emancipation. Basically, all European colonies, settler as in Australia or formal empire, used first slavery and then forms of unfree labor, indentured servitude, long term contracts, debt peonage etc. The Dutch did that in Java, the US in Hawaii and the post slavery southern states, the British in India, Africa, and Australia. These were global regimes of unfree labor that produced goods for the world market.
Was there backsliding on abolition elsewhere in the Americas similar to what occurred in the US from 1873-1890?
CVG: In general, in the Caribbean colonies, governments enacted abolition laws and were not forced to do so due to a war situation like in the US. The tendency of these governments was to keep formerly enslaved people in their place as a cheap and docile labor force. People in Suriname and the Dutch Caribbean islands were Dutch citizens, because there was no legal distinction made based on ethnicity or skin color, but in practice it was hard for them to improve their position in a racist, colonial society. In Surinamese Creole language, the term ‘Opo yu kloru’ means ‘improve your color,’ meaning that one should strive to become more European and have children who have a lighter skin color than their parents. In general, in Suriname the social position of the descendants of enslaved improved once new groups of indentured laborers came to the colony, first from India and later from Java in Dutch Indonesia.
MS: Yes, if you look at Cuba and Brazil, the two largest slave societies that abolished slavery after the US, you can perceive a similar backsliding and restrictions on the rights of freed people in order to revive lucrative plantation economies, cotton in the US, sugar in Cuba and coffee in Brazil. Basically, the demands of democracy conflicted with reviving capitalist political economies in these regions. European imperialism also targeted Black and other non-white people from across the globe, Indians and the Chinese, for cheap labor.
Were there abolitionists who were involved in emancipation movements in both the US and the Dutch Caribbean? How tied were the two movements since they seem to have been occurring at roughly the same time?
CVG: The abolitionist movement in the Kingdom of the Netherlands was a limited and rather elitist affair. In the Netherlands it was strongly influenced by Beecher-Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and by William Craft, the former enslaved who became an abolitionist. I did not find any Dutch influence on American abolitionism. In the Dutch-West Indies, there was certainly resistance against slavery among the enslaved population (for example, the 1795 uprising in Curaçao was directly influenced by the French and Haitian revolutions), but the only abolitionists who were sometimes active in these territories were British. In the second half of the 19th century, Surinamese and Curaçoan activists did influence international movements, like Garveyism and the international Labor movement.
MS: The Dutch did not develop a strong abolitionist movement like the Anglo-American movements and part of it is because the Dutch investment in slavery was much smaller than in the US and the British empire after the Anglo-Dutch wars. But the Moravians and the Dutch Mennonite converts to Quakerism, (I talk about both in my book on abolition, The Slave’s Cause), were some of the first abolitionists in North America. So, the Dutch had some influence in the rise of abolition in the US as they did in the establishment of slavery and the slave trade in the Americas. In the 19th century, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was an international best seller, but Harriet Beecher Stowe was not an abolitionist herself (again something I talk about in my book), but her book inspired abolitionists in Europe and Brazil. And as Coen points out, we must see the enslaved as part of the abolition movement, this is true in the US, Haiti, the British and Dutch Caribbean. I would recommend the wonderful new books by Andrea Mosterman and Marjoleine Kars to get a real feel for slave resistance in the Dutch colonies.
What did it mean for enslaved people that Suriname laws attached them to a specific plantation? Especially for the period before the prohibition of the Atlantic slave trade, did it have a social significance for the enslaved beyond the greater stability of family units?
CVG: This rule was of course not enacted to preserve family life, but to preserve plantations. It was enacted during British rule in Suriname when entrepreneurs bought Surinamese plantations in order to close them down and sell the enslaved people to other British colonies. The law was upheld until 1863 and it effectively created two legal regimes for enslaved persons in Suriname: privately owned persons could be sold freely (as long as mothers and children were not split), while enslaved people on plantations were seen as part of that plantation. They could not be sold individually, unless the government gave special permission. For the enslaved people it meant that most of them lived and worked on the same plantation with the same group of people. By 1850, the workforces of many plantations had developed a strong sense of community and they often opposed plans of plantation owners to transfer them to other plantations or to combine the workforces of two plantations.
MS: Restricting the mobility of plantation labor was ubiquitous in all slave societies. In the US South, the enslaved needed special passes to be able to even travel away from the plantation and farms and were always surveilled by slave patrols. The UGRR and fugitivity and voting with their feet during the Civil War to the Union Army lines is an important way in which the enslaved defied attempts to restrict their mobility. “Fugitivity” became an important way to resist slavery, either by running to free spaces or even temporary truancy. In the US, enslavers could break apart families and sell individual slaves with impunity even though they claimed to take family ties into account. In the end the logic of the market, reducing human beings to property that could be bought and sold, ruled the day. There are several good recent books on the domestic slave trade of the US which broke apart one in four slave families in the Upper South. In this sense, the Dutch were much better by having laws or at least state supervision of slave sales.
You may read the whole webinar transcription below:
Damian Alan Pargas: RIAS is a research institute, a conference center and an archive. And we organize a lot of events around all aspects of US history and Trans-Atlantic relations. But we also invest heavily in public outreach, so we organize webinars and public lectures on events that affect both our communities in the US and the Netherlands. So, issues that affect us all in the trans-Atlantic community. It almost goes without saying that slavery and the history of slavery currently constitutes a major theme in public discourse in the US and in the Netherlands and the past couple of years we have really witnessed a reckoning with slavery that I think is unique in contemporary history. We have also seen a backlash against that reckoning, so expert voices are needed now more than ever. And it is with this in mind that RIAS gathered with the Netherland American Foundation and sought to organize this webinar today. We have a long history of slavery and slave-trading here in Netherland, including where the RIAS is located – Province of Zeeland – and public discussions about slavery are front and center right now. So, we thought this would be the perfect opportunity to organize a webinar and learn more about our shared history of Trans-Atlantic slavery, this year marking the 160 anniversary of the Emancipation in the Netherlands and the Emancipation Proclamation in the US. I would like to express my sincere thanks to the Netherlands – American Foundation for agreeing to organize this webinar with us. And to Maureen Bunyan, esteemed journalist, for moderating this discussion today, and of course to our panelists, Prof. Manisha Sinha and Dr. Coen van Galen.
Wilemijn Keizer: This is a 102 years old organization founded by, among others, Franklin D. Roosevelt, to strengthen the bonds between the Netherlands and the US. And we do this through educational programs, through workshop programs, through business programs, through events and also by organizing these forums for dialogue where we can talk about topics that matter in Dutch-American relationships.
Maureen Bunyan is broadcast news pioneer and champion for equity and diversity in Journalism. She retired from broadcast news career in 2018, after nearly half a century as a reporter, producer and lead television anchor. Maureen spent most of her career in Washington DC, where she worked for WUSA9 (21 years), for ABC7 (19 years), as well as for NPR and PBS. And during her career she reported from Latin America and the Caribbean, from Africa and Asia. She was also the host of two weekly public affairs programs. She has interviewed national and international figures, including President Barack Obama, Fidel Castro, and Prime Minister Robert Mugabe. Bunyan has been awarded major honors in her field, among them, seven Emmy Awards from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. She has been inducted into the Academy’s Hall of Fame, as well as the halls of fame of the National Association of Black Journalists, of the International Women’s Media Foundation and of the District of Columbia. Bunyan attended the University of Wisconsin and holds a Master’s Degree from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education. She was also part of a special program at the Columbia University School of Journalism. She was born in Aruba of Guyanese parents. Her family emigrated to southeastern Wisconsin when she was a child.
Manisha Sinha was born in India. She received her PHD from Columbia University, where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft Prize for books about diplomacy or the history of the Americas. Author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery. Politics and Ideology in Ante-Bellum South Carolina (2020) – the book was named one of the best 10 books on slavery by Politico and was featured in The New York Times 1619 project. The Slave’s Cause. A History of Abolition (2016) was named “Editors’ choice” in the New York Times Book Review and one of the three great history books of 2016 by Bloomberg News. Her latest book is The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic (1816-1920) and that will be published next March.
Coen van Galen is manager of the Historical Database of Suriname and the Caribbean – a network of historians, archivists and volunteers in Suriname, the Dutch Caribbean and in the Netherlands which reconstructed the complete population of Suriname and the Dutch Caribbean between 1830-1950. Because of its innovative approach and Open Access policy, van Galen was granted the Dutch National Open Science Award in 2022. In 2023, the slave register of Suriname, the Dutch Caribbean and Curaçao was included in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. His recent article, “Slavery in Surinam: A Reconstruction of Life Courses 1830-1863,” was awarded the 2023 Louis Henry Award for Outstanding Research.
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Maureen Bunyan (MB): Manisha, we would like to ask you to talk with us for about ten minutes about your field, and what you have learned that relates to the anniversaries of the Emancipation Proclamations in the Netherlands and the US.
Dr. Manisha Sinha (MS): Normally, we do not think of American, that is, US slavery and emancipation as having any connections or links to the history of slavery in the Dutch Caribbean and emancipation there, but actually, to an odd coincidence, the process of emancipation unfolded at pretty much the same time in the Dutch Caribbean and the US South. And I think there is something to be learned by perhaps comparing those two. Now, I am a historian of abolition and Civil War and Reconstruction in the US. And mainly I have written, as Maureen mentioned, books as being part of that movement. That was the main argument, or one of the main arguments of my book, The Slave’s Cause. A History of Abolition, that we must look at slave resistance as sacred to the history of abolition. And wonderful work has been recently done on the history of Dutch slavery and slave resistance in the Americas. There was a time when the Netherland-American Foundation was housed in New Amsterdam and not New York. There was a time when you had a Dutch Brazil. Towards the 19th century you ended up with just those areas that continued under Dutch control, but really, if we look at the history of slavery, we have very good work that is now looking at resistance by the enslaved, but even in the Dutch colonies.
My second book, the forthcoming one, really looks at the process of emancipation. And the one thing that we must understand is that emancipation is something that unfolds through the state. It unfolds with interaction with the state actors who may not necessarily be abolitionists. And, so, when laws are passed on Emancipation, they do not sometimes need to be in tier demand of abolitionists, which may be immediate freedom, which may be demands for land reform, which may be demands for civil and political rights on the state. And that is an idea that we must keep in mind when we look at the process of emancipation and how it unfolds both in US and the Dutch Caribbean.
EMANCIPATION AS PROCESS, 1863-1873
*Lincoln’s support for the Argentinian Republic, 1862
*Emancipation Proclamation, 1863
*Dutch Emancipation, 1863
*Morant Bay Rebellion, 1865
*Overthrow of French and Spanish in Mexico and the Dominican Republic, 1866-1867
*American Reconstruction, 1866-1867
*Cuban War for Independence
*Free Womb Laws in Cuba and Brazil, 1870-1871
*Abolition in Puerto Rico, 1873
*Complete Emancipation in Dutch Caribbean, 1873
*Overthrow of American Reconstruction, 1877-1890
*Abolition in Cuba, 1886
*Abolition in Brazil, 1888
If we look at this emancipation, not as a singular event, but as a process, we can really understand the contestation that goes around emancipation. The freedom claims of enslaved people, the ways in which states and nations try to manage emancipation, so that they do not completely overturn very lucrative economies based on plantations, based on slave labor. And if we look at emancipation as not just a single event, the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation in the US, or the emancipation laws by the Dutch, we can understand this contestation and this so long afterlife of slavery that continues especially in this period from 1863 to 1873. Interestingly enough, 1873 is when the Dutch actually have true emancipation by not having freed people tied down, restricting their mobility on the long-term contract that really narrows down their freedom. In the US, you have this moment in the sun, where between 1863-1873 freed people actually get full political and civil rights, and even attempts at land reform, and that experiment after 1873 toward 1877 is systematically overthrown in the South. And you end up with a system that is not at all what the freed people had demanded or enjoyed in this ten years period. So, their histories are very different, but this process unfolds at the same time, and during this time, a lot of things are happening in the Americas that I think we need to be aware of. We know that the Argentinian Republic is also united at this time, and Lincoln sees it as an example of anti-slavery Republicanism. We know, of course, that the following year you have the Dutch Emancipation and the Emancipation Proclamation being issued by Lincoln on January 1st that frees enslaved people just under the control of the Confederacy and makes some exceptions. And that is why you have to have at the end of the Civil War a 13th Amendment to the US Constitution that finally gets rid of slavery completely. What is interesting to know is that during the US Civil War 1860-1865, you have also the Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica, and the reason why I mention this is because the British got rid of slavery also as a state sanctioned process, very similar to the Dutch. They first abolished slavery in 1833, with effect as of 1834 –freed people in most of the areas, except for one island, are tied down to plantations, their mobility is restricted, they are not given equality in the way that they want to, their livelihoods are threatened in ways that are similar to slavery, and they are answerable to former enslavers in a way that makes their freedom incomplete. The Morant Rebellion in Jamaica makes it quite clear that freed people do not want that. That they want more. And you can see this happening of course in the Dutch Caribbean, you can see this happening in the US, where freed people chafe under the restrictions that are put on them. Now, in the US, you have a different process than the Dutch and the British. You have immediate emancipation because of a war-time emergency. And because an anti-slavery party is in power and most of the enslavers have left the Union. So, it is possible, then, for the Union to move forth on emancipation. After the American Civil War, the winds of freedom really do procleed (begin a course of action) to other areas in the Americas. The French and Spanish try to destroy anti-slavery Republicanism, you could say, in Mexico and the Dominican Republic between 1866-1867. They are successfully overthrown in Mexico. The Republicans, the liberals of the Benito Juarez party get rid of the French puppet Maximilian, they execute him, and it is a victory for Mexican Republicanism. At the same time, the process of American Reconstruction is unfolding in the US. And this process does act as an inspiration for freedom struggles throughout the Americas. You can see this in the Cuban War of Independence against Spain, in the first gradual emancipation laws that are passed in Cuba at the same time, in the Spanish abolishing slavery in Puerto Rico in 1873, and of course complete emancipation in the Dutch Caribbean in 1873 as well. The overthrow of Reconstruction in the US that unfolds between 1877-1890 through racist terror, through draconian legal mechanisms, through basically ignoring the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the US Constitution to which a reactionary Supreme Court gives its blessings, shows that even in the US, you do not have a linear progress towards emancipation. This is a contested process, in which freed people make their claims and in which their former enslavers, Southern White elites, make sure that they begin a campaign of terror – KKK, and other white terror groups in the South domestic terrorism. These are not normally things that we associate with the US history, but this in fact happens in the US, and by 1890 you have a system of Jim Crow racial segregation very reminiscent of what was in South Africa racial apartheid, disenfranchisement of Black men who had won the right to vote. You have sharecropping, debt peonage, the economic autonomy of Black people is severely constricted in law and by violence, by extralegal methods. And this is a time you have abolition finally coming to Cuba and Brazil, but when abolition comes to Cuba and Brazil, it does not come the way it does in the US. This is when the experiment of interracial democracy in the US is seen as having failed. So, when they get Emancipation and they have abolition, even though it comes also with demands from freed people, from abolitionist movements, it is a very state-controlled process, and one when the rights of freed people are severely attenuated.
I want you to think about Emancipation, as I said, as not a singular event, where freedom is handed down to people, but as a process that has always been contested. Even today, in the US, which is always seen as an exceptional republic, but where, in fact, by the end of Reconstruction and until the start of the Civil Rights Movement in the 20th century, you had a system of racial apartheid that severely compromised, and one could say, even overthrew American democracy.
FROM SLAVERY TO EMPIRE
1890s: The crucial decade
1882: Chinese Exclusion Act
1890: Mississippi Plan
1890: Wounded Knee Massacre
1896: Plessy v. Ferguson
1898: Spanish-Cuban-American War
1898: Wilmington Cup and Massacre
1898: Annexation of Hawaii
1899-1902: Philippine-American War
In the US – you have nativism in the 1890s and earlier with the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Mississippi Plan, that completely disfranchises Black men, the conquest of the West against Indigenous people, ending with the massacre in Wounded Knee, but you have Jim Crow blessed by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson, and America, the US, joining the European scramble for empire, with the Spanish-Cuban-American War. They annex Hawaii, you have the Philippine-American War, where America actually gets a formal overseas empire, meaning it is no longer a colonial nation, it becomes like the European powers, like the Dutch, they acquire empire in the rest of the world. And this I think is connected to the defeat of Reconstruction and to the defeat of emancipation and its goals. And one could say that the story is the same for the Dutch, because of course we know that the Dutch also continue to have forms of servitude and unfree labor in the Dutch East Indies. Which they do not get rid of until well into the 20th century. So, what we see here, of course, is that both in the US and the Netherlands we live in the long afterlives of slavery and imperialism. And that might be true of Britain and other areas also. It is not as if these things happened in the past, emancipation took place, and everything was settled. In the US, it is a long history of contestation, one that you could say continues even today, and that is true also of the Netherlands, and Europe as a whole. Slavery flourished with empire and I want to make that clear as a last conclusion, that many times, especially in the British case, people see empire as an extension of British abolitionism. And I strongly argue against that, because even though abolitionism was used as an excuse to acquire colonies in Africa, that is something that is done by the state government, the nation-state, and we must distinguish between them and those who were truly abolitionists, who truly dreamed of abolition and democracy, of an interracial, multi-racial democracy, and the most important actors in that were enslaved people, after that freed people, who made these claims on the nation-state.
Coen van Galen (GVC):
* The main territories: Suriname (coast of South America), Curaçao, Aruba, St. Marteen
*Around 1860 – Suriname – 52,000 people living there, 2/3 of them still enslaved; Curaçao – Antilles – 32,000 – 32% still enslaved.
*On the Caribbean Islands, the majority was free, but the difference is quite extensive between the islands > Curaçao – 20% enslaved, Aruba – 20% enslaved, St. Marteen – majority enslaved
*This process of abolition is not a local phenomenon, it is a world-wide phenomenon, and Dutch are rather slow in the uptake. They abandon the Atlantic slave-trade – 1808, 1820 – even illegal slave trade is more or less finished, but they do not start to really think about abolition until around the 1840s. What happens actually is that the British abolish slavery in 1838 and France and the Danish abolish slavery in the Caribbean.
*1855 – Venezuela
*The Dutch are increasingly isolated when they still keep up slavery.
*Suriname – is more or less a traditional plantation colony, large sugar plantations, coffee plantations, cotton, and lots of plantations actually are on marshes with digs around them to keep the water out
*Curaçao – hardly any big plantations – far drier land
*St. Marteen – small scale Suriname’s style plantations, but very limited groups of people – ~ 2000 persons
*1830 – the plantation owners in Suriname realize they have to do something, they know that the British are going to abolish slavery; the numbers of enslaved people in the island are dwindling > they need to have at a certain point replacements for people living there in slavery > 1830 – start to prepare for abolitionism > try to Christianize the enslaved population – taken as chance by the enslaved population – see it as a way to improve their position, their living situation
*Slavery in Suriname is not like American-style slavery, in the sense that its possibilities to sell people are more limited in Suriname. People could not be sold individually, from a plantation, or mothers and children could not be separated > especially on large plantations, enslaved people started to become a sort of a community themselves. There are no people brought from Africa anymore, they start to create communities already on plantations
*1850 – combined plantations – struggle with the owner of the plantation > more problematic to transport them to a new location and to keep everything as it was
*a sense of self-awareness already developing
*Caribbean Islands – when we look at Curaçao – the living conditions – somewhat better and the population of enslaved people actually growing > until 1840-1850s – small-scale intra-Caribbean slave-trade, a lot of people were literally exported to Puerto Rico, to Cuba, to St. Thomas, at least till 1863 – the last export of people. At the same time, already in the early 18th and 19th century, the population in the Southern Caribbean islands was very much under the influence of the Catholic Church. People had been Christianized already in the 17th and 18th centuries, because a lot of people were sold to Venezuela, Colombia, and the Spanish rulers at that time wanted Catholic enslaved people > 1863 – the Church got a real holds on the population, making them more European style > emancipation – very much based on the idea of keeping people in place, keeping people working
*Bigger plantations in Suriname had clear voice in these politics – wanted two things: planters – wanted a population who still worked for them after abolition, they wanted compensation for abolition, they wanted indentured labor – 300 guldens/ person – compensation; Antilles – 200 guldens/ person
*Suriname – state supervision – people were more or less forced into a sort of modern labor contract – for at least 10 years – until 1873
*People celebrated the abolition of slavery > presented to them as a sort of gift from the Dutch King
*Suriname – people started to build their own lives, a lot of formerly enslaved people resented the idea that slavery could be re-introduced at a certain time and they realized that they needed some governing power here > lands > groups – worked together to gather lands over time > they bought up their own plantations
*Curaçao – different – hardly any free land available, the former slave owners tried to force people into contracts with them, but on a different scale than in Suriname – they actually organized a type of sharecropping – people were forced to work for them – in some places, far into the 20th century, even after 1950
*Aruba – the small population of enslaved people would be easily integrated in free communities that already existed > received lands and within two generations they intermarried with former free population to the extent that there is this idea that there was hardly any slavery at all.
*Slavery already diminished in importance in Long Islands after 1848, because when France abolished slavery, slavery was no longer viable in St. Marteen > limbo situation > people were not free, but they were not really enslaved, they went to compete for jobs
*Suriname – contract labor – still existed in the 1930s > slavery was not important anymore; only after 1976 – Independence of Suriname, when a lot of people from Suriname actually came to the Netherlands, people in the Netherlands and Europe realized that slavery was still famous, influenced the lives chances for people from the Antilles and Suriname
*the Dutch government – this year – formal apologies for the past slavery and the Dutch West Indies
MB: My family is from Guyana, so I am curious, I realize that the Eastern part of Guiana was also under Dutch control for almost 200 years, and the area called Berbice is now part of the nation/ Republic of Guyana. Were the same conditions at work there as were at work in the rest of the Dutch Caribbean?
CVG: Guyana, like Suriname, was taken over by the British in the Napoleonic Wars, around 1840. Guiana was not given back to the Dutch in 1850. It remained within the British Empire > 1844 – slavery abolished > period of apprenticeship > a lot of influence on the situation in Suriname, because after 1824 Guyana was a viable place to go to from Suriname. People fled from Suriname to Guyana. Even plantation owners in Guyana are trying to support/ help people from Suriname come to Guyana > slavery no longer viable in Suriname
MB: The slave trade was conducted by both the United States and the European nations. However, the actual enslavement of people did not take place on the European continent. The enslavement of people took place on this continent, in the USA. So, for Europeans at the time of the emancipation, I assume they had a different experience, a different feeling about abolition, about slavery, than Americans did. Because Europeans did not live next to people of color from Africa, they did not deal with them in their day-to-day interaction, and they did not know, obviously, we did not have the communication systems that we do today. European people as a whole did not know what was being done in their names in the colonies of their countries. Americans lived, so to speak, side by side with enslaved people, with Africans, with people of African descent. And they saw and knew, some of them, most of them, how these people lived, what some of the problems were, of course, what impact they had on American society, on the Anglo-Saxon white society. What conclusions can we draw about the fact that Europeans did not see and live with enslavement? How did that affect the movement towards Emancipation?
MS: Great question, Maureen, because, it is true that slavery in the Americas, at least in the European colonies, emerged with the colonization of the Americas, so it is part of the empire. And for many Europeans, the enslavement of Africans was something that was in the colonies, away from them, while in the US, when they became independent especially, and during the American Revolution, most of the Northern states abolished slavery, many times the kind of gradual emancipation laws that were implemented in Cuba and Brazil – you had a nation that was half slave, and half free, and connection between these, in one political system, in one nation-state, was immediate and proximal. So, when enslaved people ran away, they searched for free areas, they ran to the North, to areas that were free soil, and where they could contest their enslavement, or at least demand some protection under Northern laws of freedom that the laws of slavery denied them. But it would be an overstatement to say the Europeans did not know anything about was happening in the colonies. In the British case, especially, which I am familiar with, there is contestation, in Britain, in the 18th century, whether Britain should respect these laws of slavery. Because English common law as such did not have a law on slavery. Europe had gotten rid of servitude and serfdom, serfs had run to cities to win their freedom, just as enslaved people would do later on. Many enslaved people actually even made their way all the way to Britain. So, there was a substantial free Black population there. And there were people in Britain, ordinary people, who benefited from colonial slavery and empire. So, there was sentiment for slavery and empire linked to notions of national greatness. And the idea of slavery went quite well with notions of monarchy. And they would even refer to Rome and other antiquity, as this being part of the Western heritage. Southern slaveholders in the US evoke that history. But this was contested by abolitionism, in Britain, in Somerset Case in 1772 and in France at the same time, enslaved people being brought in from French India, and from the French colonies. And in the laws they established what we would call “the freedom principle” for their own nation. So, the conceit was that “our nation is free”. But in fact, their riches, their economy, their society were very much dependent on slave-grown objects. Whether it was cotton, sugar, coffee, it was consumed, these were the first goods that created the world market. So, early capitalism is very linked with the emergence of slavery and the slave trade. In Britain, we know that the insurance industry, the banking industry, were completely complicit with the trade in human beings and with the growth of human bondage in the Americas. So, it was very easy as an excuse to say, ‘Oh, our country is free, and this is something that happens over there,’ but these were very interlinked in a global market for cash crops being grown in the Americas. These were the reasons why these countries have empires in the first place. It is because of the profitability and it is encouraged by European states, by European monarchs – the King of England, the Duke of York was on the Board of the Royal African Company that traded enslaved people. This was not a side show, it was very much part of their national political economies. I think for many Europeans, thinking that this is an American problem that they do not know about and should not be connected to, may not be historically accurate.
CVG: Of course, people in Europe knew that slavery existed. But in Netherlands itself, slavery had always been somewhat ambivalent. At least in Europe itself, slavery was not an option, was not acceptable. At the same time, this also kept people away from Europe. So, there were hardly any enslaved people coming in. People knew what was happening, but the abolitionist movement in the Netherlands was very reluctant in the 19th century, and the colonies were seen as a way to bring wealth to the nation. Their perspective was of Netherlands as a small white country in Europe with a large empire. Nowadays, there is an emancipation movement among people from Suriname and Antillean descent in the Netherlands. I think they have really made great strides and developments – they were Dutch, but not accepted as such because of skin color.
MB: How do you help people understand the impact, the legacy of the period in history that we have been talking about, in the 1800s, the emancipation process, both by the Europeans and by the US? And I know this is a huge open-ended question, but what are the points that you feel are most salient to helping people understand the legacy of slavery and emancipation that we all share today?
MS: That is a big question, especially since we have so many movements today, against unfree labor, the abuse of labor and human traffic. These are old issues that lead to command real labor of people and deny their rights and have them produce goods for our consumption. We do not think about it today, but I think that is an ongoing problem. And you can see this even with emancipation. Once slavery has ended, European countries in their colonies experiment with different kinds of unfree labor in order to produce those same goods on which they depend and on which their nation’s glory depends. You can see this happening even with the slave trade initially, you know how the control of the African slave trade in which nearly 12 million people are transported to the Americas, goes from the Iberian Peninsula to the Dutch and West Indies and then to the French and then to the English. You can literally trace the history of capitalism through who controls the slave trade. This is a profitable business, and then having those people live in conditions of slavery and later on what was known as “coolie labor” or “indentured servitude” and other kinds of unfree labor that Europeans and the Dutch experimented in both the East Indies and the West Indies, show us that the real need was for those profits, those crops being produced, for those goods being produced, and that is a question that we are still living today, on the demands of human rights and democracy, and the demands of profitability, in capitalism, in what we are comfortable with. We do not want to think about how our sneakers may be used in child labor somewhere, the chocolate that we are consuming is grown by unfree labor in cocoa plantations somewhere. We as historians can see those connections quite easily at present.
MB: Coen, tell us about similarities, if there was any, between the abolitionist movement in the US and the abolitionist movement in the Netherlands. Were they the same? Did the abolitionists in the two countries communicate? Did they have the same motivations?
CVG: The abolitionist movement in the Netherlands was rather limited. It was a small group of people and it was influenced by examples from England and America. For example, the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the Netherlands made an enormous impression because then people started to realize that there was really something going on there. Of course, they knew that slavery existed. At the same time, there are these stories from the plantation owners who lived in the Netherlands- ‘we treat our people well, and they have a good living and we give them housing and food, so no worries about their situation.’ But later on, people realized that something was going on there. The abolition was an elitist movement.
MB: Today, in the US, we have a society that has been incredibly influenced by the legacy of slavery. In the Netherlands, of course, the Netherlands was coming to grips with its legacy. What do you think should be the next steps in understanding the legacies and in “righting the wrongs,” or should there be? Is that part of the legacy, to “right the wrongs”? And, of course, I am referring to the question of “reparatory justice.” How is that seen in the Netherlands? Is that a question that people are pondering in the Netherlands?
CVG: In the Dutch Caribbean – this feeling that there should be some justice for their situation. But also, I think, more equality, because people living in the Dutch Caribbean today, although they are Dutch and they have Dutch passports, they are still not seen as equal to the Dutch people living in Europe > we really have to work on. At the same time, descendants from Suriname and Antillean people in the Netherlands nowadays are fighting to get a serious position, an equal position – skin color holds them back.
*Big achievement against officials – Black Piets – a sort of racist correctitude in the Netherlands that helps people to get to grips with this idea that being Dutch does not mean you have to be white – you have this passport and you speak Dutch properly > needs more developments especially concerning people in the Antilles as equal to the people in Europe
MS: We have notions of citizenship that can be very exclusionary and restrictive and that is why the American experiment with Reconstruction is so important – whether that was a great democratic experiment of interracial democracy, and its fall I think it really was a global defeat because everyone thought that this was simply not possible, and you ended up with European nations experimenting with unfree labor, with empire, in ways that were really undemocratic and did not live up to their own professed ideals. I think today we really need to think about interracial democracies everywhere. You look at all the fights and the wars that take place, wars of imperialism, wars of ethnicity, religion, land, and nationhood. Unless we get out of that 19th century mindset that the nation constitutes one race, one people, one language, one religion, that is the kind of idea that fueled and gave rise to Fascism in Europe, unfortunately. We need to learn a lot about inter-racialism today. I think a lot of people in Europe are extremely upset why are these people coming here, why can not just stay in their own countries. They forget the histories of European empires, when Europeans went to other places and colonized these areas and lived there, and that history cannot be undone. I do think most nations need to go beyond paroquial notions of who constitutes a citizen. And in that sense, I think that French have something to teach us. People say that US was the first country that gave free people equal political and civil rights on Emancipation. Not true. The French Second Republic did it, in 1848, because they have just as long a tradition of rights and republicanism, and I think those are the ideals that we need to embrace today as we build an interracial democracy in each of these areas. And these are lessons not just for Europe. They are for the whole world, I think.
****
Questions from the public:
How many enslaved people were living in Curaçao around 1830?
CVG: According to the Dutch colonial government, there were 5,908 enslaved persons in Curaçao in 1830. On July 1, 1863, when slavery was abolished, their number was 6,751.
MS: Compare this to over two million in the US south in 1830 and four million in 1860.
I am wondering about the crossover period between British abolition and US/Dutch abolition (1830s-1860s) and how this impacted labor policies in regions such as the Pacific, Dutch Indonesia, and the Australian colonies where these three places interacted to a degree?
CVG: In the Dutch case, abolition in the Dutch colonies was very much influenced by the British example. The British had occupied the Dutch colonies during the Napoleonic wars (1804-1815) and returned Suriname and the Dutch Caribbean islands in 1815 on condition that the Dutch would comply with the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade (which was abolished in the British territories in 1807). The Dutch and English also set up an international court in Paramaribo, Suriname, to prosecute illegal slave international trade. After the abolition of slavery in the British colonies, the British pressured the Dutch to do the same, both in the West-Indies and in Indonesia. The Dutch government could not totally ignore this pressure, because Britain was the maritime superpower of the 19th century and the Netherlands needed British support to keep its colonies. On the other hand, the British also promoted the use of contract laborers from India as a substitute for slave labor. They were sent from India to British, French and Dutch colonies all over the world. More than 30,000 laborers from India went to Suriname.
MS: The Dutch emancipation process was very similar to the British with a long period of an intermediate state between slavery and complete freedom. The British also transported indentured labor from India throughout their empire after emancipation. Basically, all European colonies, settler as in Australia or formal empire, used first slavery and then forms of unfree labor, indentured servitude, long term contracts, debt peonage etc. The Dutch did that in Java, the US in Hawaii and the post slavery southern states, the British in India, Africa, and Australia. These were global regimes of unfree labor that produced goods for the world market.
Was there backsliding on abolition elsewhere in the Americas similar to what occurred in the US from 1873-1890?
CVG: In general, in the Caribbean governments enacted abolition laws and were not forced to do so due to a war situation like in the US. The tendency of these governments was to keep formerly enslaved people in their place as a cheap and docile labor force. People in Suriname and the Dutch Caribbean islands were Dutch citizens, because there was no legal distinction made based on ethnicity or skin color, but in practice it was hard for them to improve their position in a racist, colonial society. In Surinamese creole language, the term ‘Opo yu kloru’ means ‘improve your color’, meaning that one should strive to become more European and have children who have a lighter skin color than their parents. In general, in Suriname the social position of the descendants of enslaved improved once new groups of indentured laborers came to the colony, first from India and later from Java in Dutch Indonesia.
MS: Yes, if you look at Cuba and Brazil, the two largest slave societies that abolished slavery after the US, you can perceive a similar backsliding and restrictions on the rights of freed people in order to revive lucrative plantation economies, cotton in the US, sugar in Cuba and coffee in Brazil. Basically, the demands of democracy conflicted with reviving capitalist political economies in these regions. European imperialism also targeted Black and other non-white people from across the globe, Indians and the Chinese, for cheap labor.
Were there abolitionists who were involved in emancipation movements in both the US and the Dutch Caribbean? How tied were the two movements since they seem to have been occurring at roughly the same time?
CVG: The abolitionist movement in the Kingdom of the Netherlands was a limited and rather elitist affair. In the Netherlands it was strongly influenced by Beecher-Stowe’s ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ and by William Craft, the former enslaved who became an abolitionist. I did not find any Dutch influence on American abolitionism. In the Dutch-West Indies, there was certainly resistance against slavery among the enslaved population (for example, the 1795 uprising in Curaçao, was directly influenced by the French and Haitian revolutions), but the only abolitionists who were sometimes active in these territories were British. In the second half of the 19th century, Surinamese and Curaçoan activists did influence international movements, like Garveyism and the international Labor movement.
MS: The Dutch did not develop a strong abolitionist movement like the Anglo-American movements and part of it is because the Dutch investment in slavery was much smaller than in the US and the British empire after the Anglo-Dutch wars. But the Moravians and the Dutch Mennonite converts to Quakerism, (I talk about both in my book on abolition, The Slave’s Cause), were some of the first abolitionists in North America. So, the Dutch had some influence in the rise of abolition in the US as they did in the establishment of slavery and the slave trade in the Americas. In the 19th century, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was an international best seller, but Harriet Beecher Stowe was not an abolitionist herself (again something I talk about in my book), but her book inspired abolitionists in Europe and Brazil. And as Coen points out, we must see the enslaved as part of the abolition movement, this is true in the US, Haiti, the British and Dutch Caribbean. I would recommend the wonderful new books by Andrea Mosterman and Marjoleine Kars to get a real feel for slave resistance in the Dutch colonies.
What did it mean for enslaved people that Suriname laws attached them to a specific plantation? Especially for the period before the prohibition of the Atlantic slave trade, did it have a social significance for the enslaved beyond the greater stability of family units?
CVG: This rule was of course not enacted to preserve family life, but to preserve plantations. It was enacted during British rule in Suriname when entrepreneurs bought Surinamese plantations in order to close them down and sell the enslaved people to other British colonies. The law was upheld until 1863 and it effectively created two legal regimes for enslaved persons in Suriname: privately owned persons could be sold freely (as long as mothers and children were not split), while enslaved people on plantations were seen as part of that plantation. They could not be sold individually, unless the government gave special permission. For the enslaved people it meant that most of them lived and worked on the same plantation with the same group of people. By 1850, the workforces of many plantations had developed a strong sense of community and they often opposed plans of plantation owners to transfer them to other plantations or to combine the workforces of two plantations.
MS: Restricting the mobility of plantation labor was ubiquitous in all slave societies. In the US South, the enslaved needed special passes to be able to even travel away from the plantation and farms and were always surveilled by slave patrols. The UGRR and fugitivity and voting with their feet during the Civil War to the Union Army lines is an important way in which the enslaved defied attempts to restrict their mobility. “Fugitivity” became an important way to resist slavery, either by running to free spaces or even temporary truancy. In the US, enslavers could break apart families and sell individual slaves with impunity even though they claimed to take family ties into account. In the end the logic of the market, reducing human beings to property that could be bought and sold, ruled the day. There are several good recent books on the domestic slave trade of the US which broke apart one in four slave families in the Upper South. In this sense, the Dutch were much better by having laws or at least state supervision of slave sales.
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