In modern times the Dutch have played down the country’s history of slavery. But that has become harder as the Netherlands has grown more multicultural
They could have investigated more thoroughly. Scattered through the Rijksmuseum’s collection are paintings showing similar collars worn not by dogs, but by young black men. Referred to as “Moors”, they were routinely kept as servants in wealthy 17th-century Dutch households, a sideline of the vast European human-trafficking operation that carried millions of enslaved Africans to the Americas.
The collar is on display in the museum’s new exhibition on the history of enslavement in the Netherlands and its former colonies. It is part of a broad movement to re-examine the country’s colonial past. The Netherlands ruled Indonesia, Suriname, Curaçao and several other Caribbean islands from the 1600s until the mid-20th century, first through its East India and West India Companies and later directly. Slaves laboured on coffee, spice and sugar plantations through to the 1860s.
One challenge in staging an exhibition on slavery is a lack of physical material. “Enslaved people were not allowed to own objects, they were not allowed to write, they were hardly ever depicted,” says Valika Smeulders, the Rijksmuseum’s chief historian, who hails from Curaçao. The museum redresses this by uncovering traces in its collection that had gone unnoticed.
Some of the history in the exhibition is path-breaking. The Dutch tend to identify slavery with the Americas, but another huge branch of the trade shipped captives from the Ganges delta to Indonesia, whence they might be sold on to South Africa or occasionally the Netherlands itself. The attention to enslaved Africans and Asians in Holland is new, too. Slavery was illegal in the Dutch homeland, but slaves brought there remained in servitude, perhaps because they had few options.
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