Column by Prof. Dr Fridus Steijlen
At the end of September the book 'De slavernij in Oost en West; Het Amsterdam onderzoek' was presented. Three days later it was followed by small-scale seminars on the theme at various places in the city. The latter, of course, because of the corona measures. 'De slavernij in Oost en West' is a remarkable book. It is a state of the art, as people call it, a rendering of what is already known. Forty-one people write in the book about a wide range of matters concerning Amsterdam and slavery.
The book
The occasion for the book is the city council's wish to apologise on behalf of the city administration for Amsterdam's role in slavery. But, so the reasoning went, one first had to know what the apology was for. New research was not possible given the time available – less than a year. So it became an overview with more than 40 contributions on the entanglement of Amsterdam and its city administration in slavery. It is about the role of the city government and its administrators, about what the population knew of it and how they too were connected to products made through slavery, but it is also about how that past still works through the present.
You come to see how deeply slavery was, and sometimes still is, woven into the capillaries of society.
I had the honour of sitting on the academic advisory committee. That gives you a look behind the scenes and lets you see how hard the authors and editors (including the picture editors) work to deliver a solid end product. But it also means you get to 'taste' that end product earlier than others, because you are expected to read along.
I honestly had my doubts when I began the forty-odd short chapters. Small pieces of history about many different things. But the more I 'tasted' and read, the harder the manuscript hit. It was like doing a thousand-piece jigsaw: the more pieces on the table, the more the whole unravels. And that was incredible. You come to see how deeply slavery was, and sometimes still is, woven into the capillaries of society. The barge skippers who carried sugar or spices from Amsterdam to the interior also lived off goods produced by enslaved people. Today we set store by chain responsibility, meaning that shops must be able to guarantee that their products were not made by child labour or slave labour. Chain responsibility belongs to the present and certainly not to the past. But you also come to realise that the attention that always went to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and exploitation on the plantations, however justified, blocked your view. Because in what is called in Dutch 'de Oost' (the East), slavery most definitely existed too.
What did you learn?
In the days before the book launch a Moluccan friend asked me what I had learned from the manuscript. 'A great deal,' I told him, but one thing in particular. That is that we need a new lens through which to look at colonial history in Asia, in Indonesia and in the Moluccas.
We have in fact long spoken and written in euphemistic terms about forms of slavery and forced labour. When we spoke about the perken on Banda, after the massacre by J.P. Coen in 1621, we did speak of the enslaved people who were given to work the plantations, but we did not really speak about the perkeniers, who were also beneficiaries of forced labour. We spoke of a 'monopoly' on the spice trade, which sounds like an economic mechanism, but in fact Moluccan farmers were forced to work for a price imposed on them by the VOC. That too is a form of forced labour. In the later colonial periods we speak of herendiensten as a form of taxation, but in doing so we are really also speaking about forced labour and the deprivation of freedom by a foreign ruler. And what to make of the women who, as nyai, were treated as property by colonial masters. Fortunately that has been written about recently, but for too long it was taken as a 'given'. Displacement also occurred systematically in Asia. There too, enslaved people were taken from one place to another and traded. That trade was less of a 'specific economic activity' of the Dutch East India Company than it was of the Dutch West India Company. It therefore stood less in the foreground, but it did happen.
What I have learned, I summarised, is that we need a new lens for colonial history in Asia. One that gives a better view of forced labour and slavery. Not in order to start a race in slavery between 'the East' and 'the West'. The impact of trans-Atlantic slavery is still very much felt, and so is that in Asia. But for too long we have muffled it euphemistically in economic jargon. It is important to start seeing it and naming it. Then we can discover the differences and the similarities and take steps forward.
Fort Belgica on Banda Neira
The moment
Those were my lessons, I told my friend. And then came the presentation and the seminars, with a great deal of attention in the media. I then realised that Amsterdam city council had, probably without a preconceived plan, created a momentum. They could have offered apologies and we would have discussed those apologies a little. Instead a moment arose before those apologies in which the existing knowledge about the Dutch history of slavery, and Amsterdam's in particular, stood concentrated in the spotlight. In it, slavery worldwide was discussed, and therefore slavery in 'the East' too; Banda was discussed as one of the first places where the Dutch systematically used enslaved people. And the whole of the Netherlands witnessed it.
This is the moment to put on a new historical lens and look again at colonialism in relation to slavery in Asia.
