In the wake of the global turn in both social-economic history and slavery studies, historians seem to be rediscovering an insight that is as obvious as it is fundamental – namely that all of the slavery-related and colonial economic activities that developed in the course of the European expansion occurred within the context of a political-economic order that closely tied these economic activities to the imperial ambitions of European states.⁴ The coerced transportation by European merchants of more than 12 million enslaved Africans created the basic conditions of the wider Atlantic system of coerced labour exploitation. Early modern merchant and ruling elites had large interests in developing, expanding and protecting the commodity chains that flowed from the Atlantic slavery complex. In this respect, colonialism was not merely a project of international prestige and competition, and the impact of the trans-Atlantic slave trade was not merely cultural or ideological.⁵ The slave trade played a strategic role in the Atlantic system, exactly because it organized the massive coerced transportation of humans from West-Africa, introducing them into the European colonies in the Americas as the commodified and unfree labour that was at the heart of the Atlantic colonial plantation production.⁶ This Atlantic slave-based production in turn catalyzed commodity chains stretching across the globe – from the production of Indian and Silesian textile, to the manufacture of Dutch and Bohemian glass, and the export trade of tobacco and coffee to European hinterlands.⁷ Eighteenth-century lobbyists to the city council of Amsterdam could, for example, easily argue that ‘no workman, whatever his trade may be, can be found in Amsterdam, whose earning does not also rely on this Colonie to some extent’.⁸

Scholars have thus started to challenge the narrow focus on the slave trade only, and the question of its perceived low profitability in Dutch scholarship and debates,⁹ and have shown ‘that Atlantic slavery has had an enormous influence on the world economy, and the role of Europe in it’.¹⁰ Instead, they have (re-)introduced an approach that uses the ‘gross margin’ of slavery related economic activities to trace the impact of the Atlantic slavery system. In 2012, Van Rossum and Fatah-Black showed that the Dutch Atlantic slave trade industry alone contributed up to 0.5 percent to the economy of the entire Dutch Republic. This intervention emphasized that, although the slave trade was a highly strategic sector, it was actually one of the smaller legs of the wider Atlantic slavery complex. We therefore called for the ‘gross margin’ based method to be used for ‘further reconstructions of the size and impact of other elements of the Atlantic system’ in order to ‘provide new insights for the debate on the role of slavery and the related economic activities in the trans-Atlantic trade system and the influence on the development of early modern Europe’.¹¹

In recent years, a new wave of scholarship has shown exactly how widespread and deep the impact of this Atlantic system was on the Dutch Republic and the wider European economy. Gerhard de Kok, for example, showcased the considerable weight of the slave trade on the local and regional level. Around one-tenth to even one-third of the economies of specific port cities such as Middelburg and Flushing consisted of economic activities related to the slave trade.¹² Ulbe Bosma and Pepijn Brandon expanded on the ‘gross margin’ approach by calculating the contribution of slave-based activities to the GDP of the Dutch Republic (5.2 percent) and the province of Holland (10.36 percent) around 1770.¹³ Tamira Combrink showed how these commodity chains also impacted the structure of the Dutch economy. Showing that the coffee trade rose from almost nothing to a share of ‘9.5 percent of the total trade value’ of the Dutch Republic in the span of a few decades in the second half of the eighteenth century, she argues that the export trade in slave-produced coffee was a key factor in re-orienting the Dutch economy from the Baltic and Mediterranean trades towards the Rhine trade to the German hinterland.¹⁴

In similar fashion, recent research has highlighted how specific early modern Dutch industries became entangled with the slave trade and the slavery complex. Felicia Fricke has demonstrated how the seventeenth-century Amsterdam glass factories emerged in relation to Dutch Atlantic and Dutch East India Company slave trading.¹⁵ Merel Blok has shown the eighteenth-century links of the iconic and booming Schiedam gin distilleries to especially the Rotterdam slave trade by Coopstad en Rochussen.¹⁶ The smoking chimneys of the Dutch involvement in slavery and slave trade literally blackened early modern Dutch cities.

One key sector that became intimately linked to the slave trade and slavery was that of finance and insurance. In an analysis of insurance conditions in early modern Dutch slave trade, Karin Lurvink recently stressed that ‘slavery and the financial sector were connected’, arguing that coverage of suppressed revolts and penalization of successful revolts by insurers may even have impacted the severity of repression on board slave ships.¹⁷ Research commissioned by De Nederlandsche Bank showed that the starting capital of the bank came from owners with direct interests in plantation slavery, and that the bank ‘served the slave-based production chain’ both within and outside the borders of the Dutch empire.¹⁸ Research commissioned by ABN AMRO has pointed out that, in the eighteenth century, for the firms of Hope & Co and R. Mees & Zoonen – both predecessors of the bank – slavery-related activities made up a large part of their portfolio and that, in the nineteenth century, they became active in slavery in the US South and also in other forms of coerced colonial labour.¹⁹ Unfortunately, neither of these bank-commissioned studies looked at the role of these banks in those other forms of coerced colonial labour, the relations with slavery, or the impact of these banks on the transformation of economic development and (coercive) labour exploitation across the globe in the long run. Especially the role of coercive corvée labour regimes – first employed by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) on Java, Sri Lanka and Ambon and later intensified as the Cultivation System – remains one of the key blind spots in Dutch research.²⁰

The Dutch Republic was obviously not alone in its strong reliance on slavery and slave-based economic activities, and the studies mentioned here join a wider landscape of new research that suggests the importance of slavery for different parts of Europe. Klass Rönnbäck recently estimated that the economic activities tied to the Atlantic slavery complex made up as much as 11 percent of the entire British economy by the early nineteenth century.²¹ Earlier he showed that at, the end of the eighteenth century, the ‘three small islands of the Danish West Indies’, with a population of only 1 percent of the Danish empire, contributed a net profit equal to some 5 or 6 percent of the total public revenue of Denmark proper, which ‘was repatriated straight into the coffers of the Danish Kingdom’.²² For Portugal, earlier studies have estimated the contribution of the overseas empire at ‘around 20 percent’ of Portugal’s per capita income.²³ For the port city of Hamburg it has been estimated that the value of the slave-based commodities of sugar and coffee rose from a share of 39 percent of the total imports into the city in the 1730s to more than 62 percent in the 1790s. To indicate the importance of these links between the Atlantic complex and this single port it must be considered that Hamburg’s trade as the major port in the region represented ‘about 70 percent of all overseas imports’ of middle and northern Germany.²⁴ Following the traces of the impact of Atlantic slavery even deeper into the European hinterlands, Anka Steffen recently estimated that, at the end of the eighteenth century, the production of linen for the Atlantic slavery complex accounted for some ‘15 percent of the total value of all manufactures produced in the Prussian state’.²⁵

One classic debating strategy of scholars committed to playing down the Dutch history of slavery has been to challenge these findings and their implications by questioning whether specific percentages should be considered ‘small’ rather than ‘large’. Of course, this game of relative comparison can be a deceptive one, as any two year old infant learns to understand through play (small spoon, big spoon! Big bear, little bear!). Some examples can show the large impact of seemingly small numbers. A clear point of reference for the importance of the slavery-related contributions to early modern Dutch economy can be provided by contemporary sectors that have a similar spinoff and are considered and treated as crucial for national economies. In 2006, on the eve of the globally disruptive financial crisis of 2007–2008, it was calculated that the added gross value of the entire ‘financial and insurance services’ was 7.7 percent of the UK’s GDP and 7.5 percent of the US’s GDP. In 2016, the digital economy contributed 6.5 percent to the GDP of the United States, making the sector a ‘notable contributor to the overall economy’. In the Dutch context, a comparison might be made with the port of Rotterdam which, in 2017, all dependent logistics, industry and financial services included, represented 6.2 percent of the total GDP of the Netherlands. These comparisons provide two clear arguments as to why the impact of the Atlantic slavery complex was significant. First, all of these contemporary sectors are considered too big to fail. This was perhaps most evident in the 2007–2008 financial crisis with massive bailouts and a subsequent deep economic downturn. Second, similar to the financial sector or for example the port of Rotterdam, the early modern Atlantic slave trade and economy were closely linked to a myriad of other sectors, from supplying and processing to servicing industries.²⁶

This Special Issue moves the Dutch debate on the economic impact of Atlantic slavery and slave trade beyond this numbers game, as has been mentioned as perhaps one of the shortcomings of earlier interventions in the debates by, for example, Van Rossum and Fatah Black (2012), and Brandon and Bosma (2019). In the introduction to the Special Issue ‘Europe and Slavery. Revisiting the Impact of Slave-Based Activities on European Economies, 1500-1850’, with Tamira Combrink, we therefore argued that slavery and slave trade were part of the larger structures of political economies we can only improve our understanding of if we reconstruct their roles and effects through systematic comparative and connecting global approaches that address both the quantitative and the qualitative aspects.²⁷ This implies that we should combine quantitative assessments with (new) qualitative approaches to the economic, institutional, political, cultural, and social dimensions of the histories of slavery and slave trade.

The articles of this Special Issue explore different roads that venture out from these insights. From various perspectives, each shows how slavery and slave trade had strategic importance and were instrumental in the political economy of the Dutch Republic. Together, these contributions thoroughly deconstruct the longstanding notion in Dutch historiography that the Atlantic slave trade and slavery were unprofitable and marginal to the early modern Dutch economy.

Cátia Antunes and Ramona Negrón explore how Dutch and especially Amsterdam merchants actively strived to gain access to Spanish American slave trade markets. Their article shows how, from the 1640s onwards, Dutch slave traders became a key player in supplying enslaved Africans to the Spanish American colonies. This established the position of Curaçao as the largest Caribbean slave-trading entrepôt. For the Dutch merchants and ruling elite this slave trade was important also beyond the potential profits of the trade itself and its importance to the development of the slave-based colonial economies of the Americas. Antunes and Negrón argue that the slave trade of Dutch merchants to the Spanish empire was also motivated by the opportunities it offered to gain access to silver. The slave trade via Curaçao generated silver flows to the Dutch Republic that were crucial in meeting the VOC’s high demand for bullion for its operations in Asia.²⁸

Studying the shareholders of the Middelburgse Commercie Compagnie (MCC), in his article, Van der Blij builds upon the important notion that direct profits from the slave trade were often of less interest to investors, and that the interest lay more in ‘obtaining a beneficial position as preferred supplier to slaving companies and partnerships’, as Gerhard de Kok explained in his study of the impact of the slave trade on Walcheren.²⁹ These studies have picked up on the point that it is crucial to move ‘beyond profitability’ to understand the role of the slave trade for the Dutch economy and instead start to explore the impact the economic spinoff of this trade created in the Dutch Republic.³⁰ Van der Blij shows that much of the outfitting and supplying of departing slave ships, as well as the buying of returning goods, was done by shareholders who also acted as preferred suppliers and buyers of the MCC. All of the chest makers, for example, were MCC shareholders. As is known, bills of exchange became a crucial credit instrument for slave plantation owners buying enslaved Africans from slave traders such as the MCC.

As with the study by Antunes and Negrón, this presents us with an interesting link to the wider global context of the Atlantic slavery system. Van der Blij concludes that the main customer for these bills of exchange were not the shareholders but the VOC, most likely as a way to obtain bullion, which it was increasingly shipping from the Dutch Republic to Asia in the eighteenth century, as the VOC’s access to Asian sources was diminishing.³¹ This is an interesting reminder of how colonial systems of slave-based exploitation were interacting across the Dutch empire and across the globe, as the VOC did not only buy bullion in Japan, Manilla, India and Persia, but also developed silver and gold mines in Sumatra and Java that operated with the labour of enslaved people. The mines in Silida (Sumatra) were directly run by the VOC between 1669 and 1738, after which the mines were rented out to a local ruler. The more than 500 enslaved workers were bought and transported by the VOC from Madagascar, Nias and other places throughout the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago.³²

Based on an extraordinary and even revolutionary archival find, Erik Odegard studies the private involvement in the slave-based economy of the newly acquired Dutch colony in Brazil in the seventeenth century. The archives of the Raad van Brabant allow him to create a first time reconstruction of these private investments in the first large Dutch Atlantic colony. The case of Dutch Brazil is crucial in understanding the role of slavery and slave trade in relation to the early Dutch endeavors in colonial expansion. The conquest of Brazil occured after the first largescale experiences with slavery in the violently conquered Banda Islands (1621) and Batavia (1619). From the early 1620s onwards, the VOC then continued to set up largescale slave trade from the Bay of Bengal (Coromandel and especially Arakan), and conquered the island of Formosa, with the specific intent of producing sugar and rice. It is within this context that the West India Company (WIC) made attempts to conquer West African slave trade ports as well as the Portuguese colonies in Brazil.³³ For the Atlantic historiography, Odegard rightfully points out that ‘Dutch historiography tends to focus on issues like shipborne trade and commerce, but pays less attention to land-bound issues like investment in the colonial economy.’ He shows how the WIC operated as a colonial power, but one that tried to attract and foster the colonial economy under its rule through private investors. Many of these investors would continue their activities in the later Dutch colonies in the Caribbean.

Tamira Combrink shows how the increase of the Rhine trade in the eighteenth century was linked to the trade in colonial commodities such as sugar, coffee, tobacco, and other tropical items. This upstream Rhine trade from the Dutch Republic connected the Caribbean plantation economies to globalising German consumption patterns. Combrink shows that the trade within Europe consisted increasingly of the re-exports of slave-based products on the one hand, and the trade in provisioning and supply for the slave-based Atlantic production complex on the other. The Atlantic complex gave a major impulse to intra-European trade, and this contributed significantly to European economic development.

So where does all this leave (future) scholarship? Most obviously, it is time for economic history to further explore the relations between (Atlantic) slavery and capitalism, economic growth, underdevelopment and inequality. It is also clear that solely quantitative approaches to these themes alone will not suffice, but need to be accompanied by more qualitative approaches that allow for an understanding of the changing political-economic contexts and relations between slavery, capitalism, and politics.³⁴ The key issue is not whether such a more encompassing approach is necessary, but rather how such a research agenda should take shape. At least four relevant steps forward can be identified at this point.

First, the study of the large impact of seemingly small numbers has been set in motion, but systematic, in-depth, and long-term analyses on local, sectoral, and even national levels remain wanting. The impact of the Atlantic slavery complex has been explored mostly for a few selected economic sectors (finance, slave trade, and provisioning) and cities (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht, The Hague).³⁵ These studies have pointed at the wider range of entanglements of many industries, both within early modern and nineteenth-century Netherlands, as well as beyond its borders. Many more links, sometimes unexpected, often un(der)explored, are waiting to be studied: from gin production to shipbuilding, from glass manufacture to textiles, from the processing and re-export of colonial goods to the recruitment of (military) labour, and many more.

Second, moving the study of the entanglements of the Dutch and European economy beyond the numbers game, beyond the conclusion that slavery and slave trade-related economic activities did indeed matter, entails that we should return to the question of how these connections with the Atlantic slavery complex worked, and especially what changes they set in motion. This classic theme of the impact of the Atlantic slavery complex was most famously introduced by Eric Williams,³⁶ but in later debates perhaps not served well with a too narrow focus on the direct link between slavery and industrialization. There is reason to take up these questions in a broader perspective.³⁷ The work of Tamira Combrink suggests, for example, that it was the Rhine trade in sugar and coffee that initiated a major shift in the orientation of the Dutch economy.³⁸ Similar arguments could be made for the financialization of the activities of economic elites.³⁹ Or for the effects of Atlantic slavery on the intensification of serfdom and coercion in the Silesian linen production.⁴⁰ Exactly such questions should be explored better and more in-depth, for more regions and sectors, to gain a better insight in the transformations that were set in motion by the entanglements of the European economy and the Atlantic slave trade and slavery.

Third, it is relevant to assess how, in turn, these entanglements were also reciprocal relations. The issue of how insurance policies may have helped to shape and strengthen the violent and cruel repressions during the middle passages of the slave trade, as raised by Karin Lurvink, is an important reminder. The involvement of the Dutch economy and state with colonial slavery not only impacted the Netherlands itself, but also deeply influenced dynamics outside Europe, from the regions where slave trade was conducted, to the many middle passages itself, and the colonies enslaved people were transported to.

Last and fourth, systematic contextualizations are needed but are too often still lacking. Several important domains of contextualization can be identified that deserve renewed and closer attention in upcoming research. For example the role of the state – and especially how the policies and actions of the early modern and modern Dutch governments, from the Estates General to the Stadholder, from cities to provinces, and from chartered companies to the admiralties – shaped and safeguarded the Dutch involvements and interests in colonial slavery and slave trade across the globe. Or the role of Dutch merchant-ruling elites – and how private and familial financial and economic interests shaped not only Dutch politics and policies, but also impacted colonialism and exploitation across the globe. And, as Filipa Ribeiro da Silva recently reminded us, it is important to also look at the role of local colonial elites, and to move beyond ‘the one-way directional relationship between colonial and metropolitan economies as well as the idea that gains and gainers from the slave trade and slave-based products were only to be found in Europe’.⁴¹ One important avenue for future research would be to better connect these insights to the complex dynamics in (colonized) regions outside Europe, assessing further how slavery and colonial exploitation not only hampered economic development, but also shaped local and regional economic and social inequalities.