Slavery and Emancipation – serie

In this book, a new generation of scholars offers fresh perspectives on the history of the Dutch slave trade. Traditionally, Dutch research has focused on business practices, often overlooking the enslaved and the complexities of illegal trade and violence. By experimenting with innovative methodologies and underutilised primary sources, this volume reveals the potential to uncover perspectives of enslaved people aboard slave ships, to investigate unstudied areas like sexual violence, and to examine the roles of Dutch elite in the trade.

This study centers on the Dutch Republic, where Roman law—applied alongside contemporary legislation—was used to regulate the lives of enslaved individuals across its territories, albeit in a highly selective manner. Which provisions of Roman law were implemented, and what led to the exclusion of others? This book investigates these questions through a historical analysis of the legal transfer of Roman law within both the metropole and the colonies. Special attention is given to the private law governing enslaved persons in the Dutch Republic and its overseas territories, including the WIC‑administered islands of Curaçao, Aruba, and Bonaire, the Sociëteit van Suriname, and the VOC‑controlled Cape Colony. The 2012 Bellagio‑Harvard Guidelines on the Legal Parameters of Slavery identify legal institutions grounded in the notion of ownership, providing a valuable framework for legal‑historical research on slavery.

An indispensable resource for academics and general readers, this fully translated and revised edition of De grootste slavenhandelaren van Amsterdam. Over Jochem Matthijs en Coenraad Smitt (Walburg Pers, 2022) examines the emergence of private Dutch slave trading in the eighteenth century. Focusing on the enterprise of Jochem Matthijs and Coenraad Smitt – whose slave ships transported an estimated 11,000–13,000 enslaved West Africans to Suriname – Ramona Negrón and Jessica den Oudsten reconstruct the experiences of shipboard crew and captives and uncover the inner workings of the private slave trade.Drawing upon newly uncovered archival materials, the authors demonstrate how the West India Company’s abandonment of its monopoly in the 1730s precipitated a flourishing private trade. Pioneering case studies – most notably the return voyage of the ’t Gezegende Suikerriet – reveal voices long silenced in conventional narratives.This edition features a new revised introduction and a new epilogue, making it the definitive scholarly account of Amsterdam’s principal private slave traders and their enduring legacies.

News Making examines how people in Curaçao and Sint Maarten turn events into stories that shape public life. Based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2015 and 2019, the book develops an analytical distinction between ‘news’ as an everyday social practice and ‘the news’ as institutional media. Moving from the late nineteenth century to the present, it traces how colonial governance, missionary activity, oil industrialization, and constitutional reform (10/10/10) have structured emerging publics in the Dutch Caribbean.Theoretically, the book reworks debates on the public sphere, creolization, and popular culture within a relational understanding of empire, bringing social and media theory into conversation with Caribbean intellectual traditions. Methodologically, it combines archival research with interviews, newsroom ethnography, and attention to rumor, gossip, and oral storytelling as forms of popular news making. Case studies include the rise of Papiamentu-language newspapers after the 1969 revolt on Curaçao, the role of news and ‘the news’ in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma on Sint Maarten in 2017, and contemporary popular news media on both islands.By foregrounding everyday news making as a practice of belonging, News Making offers a rethinking of news beyond liberal-democratic norms. It will interest undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars in media and communication, anthropology, Caribbean studies, and postcolonial studies, as well as informed non-specialist readers.

In Slavery and Post-Apartheid Cultural Production in South Africa: Holding Memory, Nicola Cloete investigates the intricacies of memory, heritage, identity, and nation-building within the context of South Africa’s history of slavery.Combining theoretical, archival, and ethnographic research through an interdisciplinary use of memory, the author crafts new frameworks for analysing how memory is mobilised in recovering histories of slavery in post-apartheid South Africa. By examining wine farms, museums and memorials, walking tours, and ethnographic experiences, the book elucidates how memory is embodied and emplaced through affective encounters. Using diverse theoretical approaches to memory, Cloete devises a theory of ‘holding memory’ and ultimately argues that memory enables a validated claim for participation and belonging in the post-apartheid nation for a range of stakeholders through the mobilisation of a previously marginalised historic event.An important contribution, this book shows how memories of slavery are negotiated and deployed between cultural identity and national discourses of race and reconciliation. It will be of interest to researchers in the fields of cultural and sensory studies and memory studies.