MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 16th June, 2023) The Dutch reigning House of Orange-Nassau earned at least 545 million Euros ($596.6 million) in today's money from the Dutch colonies at the peak of the slave trade between 1675-1770, a Dutch International Institute of Social History (IISG) study on the afterlives of the Netherlands' former colonies has found.
"Slavery was intentionally made a fundamental element of Dutch colonial expansion in Africa, the Americas and Asia. The Dutch state and its predecessors were directly responsible for this ... Colonial slavery helped to give the Netherlands its economic advantage and led to fundamental changes within those societies around the world from which enslaved people were taken or that were formerly colonized," senior IISG researcher Matthias van Rossum said in a blog post on the institute's website on Thursday.
The study found that William III, William IV and William V were the stadtholders, or heads of state, in the Republic of the United Netherlands, and profits from colonies accounted for half of their now-known official incomes as stadtholders.
The researchers have presented a book based on the study's results to Minister of the Interior and Kingdom Relations Hanke Bruins Slot, who said that the results of the research showed "an uncomfortably difficult and sometimes downright shocking picture" of the Dutch state's involvement in colonial slavery.
The book examines the history of Dutch slavery and "its afterlives" and provides the foundation for continuing the research later this year. The study has been requested by the Dutch Interior Ministry and is part of a joint project carried out by the IISH, the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, the National Institute for the Study of Dutch Slavery and its Legacy, and the University of Curacao.
Dutch slave traders shipped more than 600,000 Africans to the kingdom's South American and Caribbean colonies during the 17th and 18th centuries until the Netherlands formally abolished slavery in 1863. It took Suriname another decade to end the practice. Around 1 million more slaves were trafficked in Asia by the government-controlled Dutch East India Company to work on its plantations.
