He arranged an attic full of scientists from all over the world to google together, on a warm October day in 2024, how many people had ever lived in slavery under the Dutch flag. The thirty academics were fellows from the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS) in Amsterdam, where Leendert van der Valk worked on a book about the history of slavery.
Some arrived frustrated with nothing, others with varying numbers. All the Dutch dug up one and the same number: “600,000 Africans”, approximately 5 percent of the total transatlantic slave trade. But that couldn’t be right. Where was the Asian part of the Dutch trade, Sri Lanka, India, the plantations in ‘the East’? There the figure of “1.5 million” Dutch slaves emerged.
Van der Valk (45) made the “forgotten places, forgotten people” the subject of his book, which has just been published. He consulted a load of recent historical research and delved into the archives. He arrived at very different estimates than the standard “600,000 Africans” from Wikipedia and schoolbooks: millions of people once lived under Dutch slavery. In Forgotten places, forgotten people (Publisher Boom) he offers an “atlas” of the Dutch slavery past: a series of historical stories from lesser-known regions, from Tobago to Angola, Taiwan and Japan. He also presents a meticulous calculation of the numbers of people involved, based on a long list of archival material and historical research.
You are a music journalist – among other things NRC – and lecturer in journalism at the University of Amsterdam. How did this ball start rolling?
“It actually started with the music, I have always been interested in cultural exchange between continents. When was African music first heard in America? Then of course you end up with the history of slavery. Then came The New York Times with the ‘1619’ project, about the first African slaves transported to America. I read that and thought: hey, that was an English ship but with a Dutch letter of marque. I wrote a piece about that and then I started looking for those types of stories.”
Your conclusion is: the Dutch slavery history is much broader in both time and place than the standard ‘600,000’ of the transatlantic route.
“Certainly. There are all kinds of places and groups of people associated with it that we do not have a picture of. Guyana, where there were once more Dutch slaves than in Suriname, Tobago, islands in the Caribbean Sea, Madagascar, Mozambique, islands in the Indonesian archipelago where slavery sometimes existed until the twentieth century. The problem is that the transatlantic route is now more or less the benchmark. It is also quite well documented, after all it was about trade, but then you are so very late a lot is not taken into account: children who were born into slavery, stolen people who died before they were transported, the entire Dutch slavery around the Indian Ocean. You have to gather figures about this from all kinds of sources. Fortunately, more attention has been paid to the broader story lately.”
View of the port of Suratte, India, circa 1670. This city in the northwest of India was of great importance to the VOC.
Rijksmuseum image
You’re not a historian yourself, did that matter?
“Well, all the stories have been read by specialists. The fact that I am not a historian also means that I sometimes ask different questions. When were people first enslaved by the Dutch? That is really a journalistic question. That is how I came across the voyage of Cornelis de Houtman, the very first colonial voyage in the Netherlands, who enslaved two indigenous men in Madagascar. Off the African coast he met Admiral Joris van Medemblick, with a cargo ‘Suicker and Swarten, most female couples’on the way to the slave market in Lisbon. That was in 1595! While in every history book you can read that Dutch slavery only became serious in 1637 when Elmina, the Portuguese stronghold on Africa’s Gold Coast, was conquered. But in 1595, De Houtman came across five Dutch ships on their way to the slave market in Portugal and enslaved two children himself.”
Van der Valk arrives at 3.3 million to 5.3 million people who lived in slavery in Dutch colonies between 1600 and 1900 and 4.1 to 6.3 million people are included as victims who died before being transported.
Those are significant margins, how high are these new numbers?
“As far as I am concerned, these are estimates that in any case provide a direction away from that 600,000 that does not come close to reality. It remains difficult, of course, because, for example, mortality before transport was not recorded, children were often only counted as half or as a third and mortality and birth figures are often difficult to determine. You have to extrapolate based on the available sources. I have had a lot of contact with historical demographers in Nijmegen. By the way, I am always on the side of sit on the conservative side. An example is the number of children, which is very difficult to calculate.”
Are slavery in ‘the West’, chattel slavery on plantations, and that in ‘the East’ comparable?
“There is a persistent idea that slavery in the VOC area would have been less serious. In any case, I find it problematic to say that one type of slavery was ‘less serious’ than another. But there is simply not much basis for thinking that. There were also plantations in Indonesia or on the Banda Islands. And the question is whether domestic slavery, which was common in Asia – also in Suriname or the Antilles by the way – was so much less serious. people were also just legal property of their masters. Hereditary slavery existed there too. It is the same colonial system.”
What shocked you most about those figures?
“The share of children at all. Every time I delved into such a journey or story I came across it. Slave trade was largely child trafficking. I never really realized that. That is not always clear from the figures that have been handed down, because children were sometimes only counted for half or sometimes for a third. So then there is a chance that it says ‘so many on board’, but one child can be three people. Houtman, who came from the trip 1595, also made a number of people slaves in Java. They managed to escape again. To calculate the child mortality rate in slavery, we started from Suriname because there is still data available.”
And then there was Guyana, another forgotten Dutch colony.
“Yes, certainly. Until 1814 it was Dutch. And of course we often don’t realize that at all, because it was so long ago. But research shows that about 100,000 people lived in slavery there at the time it became British. So that is much bigger than Suriname. The story I have about it is from a Dutchman in Leiden who grew up in Guyana and at one point gets a lot of money because the British abolished slavery and compensated planters. Yes. And he still had a plantation. So there is someone in Leiden and he suddenly gets a lot of money because until then he had all the people in slavery in a colony that is not seen as Dutch. I believe that about 16 percent of that total British compensation ended up in Dutch hands.”
A Dutch factory in Bengal (East India), probably Cossimbazar. Painting by Hendrik van Schuylenburgh, circa 1665.
Rijksmuseum image
You also pay attention to indigenous slaves, also a forgotten group.
“Yes, certainly. Relatively little is known about this in a Dutch context. While we know that there were also indigenous slaves in New Amsterdam. Among the Ramapo-Munsee who live above New York you now also come across Dutch surnames, De Vries is then Defreese. It is true, because it is so often said that we know little about it, little research is also done into it. While you often find references to indigenous people in the sources, especially in the seventeenth century. The difference is that native enslaved people did not have to be transported across an ocean, so you won’t find them on ship trading lists.”
In your calculations you do not consider the economic side of the matter, the money.
“I actually find that economic approach a bit problematic, because it ensures that your view remains limited. Many of the sources and archives are based on it, which is all driven by trade. But then you miss entire groups, such as children born into slavery who never reached their first year of life.”
What would you say to someone who says: not another book about the history of slavery?
“That it may seem like a thing of the past, but it still continues to have an effect on a daily basis. In racism, but also in the global distribution of prosperity and opportunities. And that there is so much that we do not yet know or map properly. Or would like to forget. I also discuss a ‘forgotten’ genocide in the book. We all know about JP Coen’s massacre on the Banda Islands, but on another island there had already been a kind of, well, practice genocide. There, pennies have really fallen: aha, this is how we can do it. Depopulate first, and then bring other people there.”
Where has slavery existed the longest, under Dutch authority?
“In the Indies. Because in the vast archipelago the abolition of slavery in 1860, three years earlier than in Suriname, was very half-hearted. It actually mainly happened on Java or the Banda Islands. But when the Netherlands laid a colonial claim on the entire archipelago in the 19th century, there was still plenty of slavery there, which involved hundreds of thousands of people.”
But it wasn’t created by the Dutch, was it?
“No, but they did formally live under Dutch authority and under Dutch law, which prohibited slavery. Money was made with these people for generations. The last place where the law was finally applied was the island of Samosir, in a lake on Sumatra, in 1914. So as far as I am concerned, the history of slavery runs from 1595 to 1914.”