Amsterdammers to be given free book showing city’s role in slave trade

‘We need to know the facts and not be afraid of the conversation,’ says deputy mayor

King Willem-Alexander looks on during the opening of the Slavery exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam on 18 May (ANP/AFP via Getty Images)

Residents of Amsterdam are being offered a free book that explores the city’s historical associations with slavery.

The initiative is part of a wider push to encourage those living in the Netherlands to understand the nation’s role in the organisation and management of the global slave trade. Just last month, King Willem-Alexander, the country’s monarch, opened the first exhibition on the issue at the Rijksmuseum.

The book, Amsterdam and the History of Slavery, uses extensive research carried out by the International Institute of Social History on behalf of the municipality of Amsterdam. Copies of it are now being made available to the capital’s residents and can be picked up at City Hall and larger libraries.

Researchers are said to have uncovered the integral role that Amsterdam administrators played in the Dutch East India company and the Dutch West India company. They have also explored the investments of high-profile individuals in slave ships and sugar plantations.

Rutger Groot Wassink, Amsterdam’s deputy mayor, told Het Parool newspaper on Friday: “Who we are as a city is partly determined by our shared past – the beautiful and the terrible. We need to know the facts and not be afraid of the conversation.”

“In this way we can share the lessons of the past with each other and pass them on to new generations,” he said.

The news was met with a positive reaction on social media. One UK resident tweeted: “The Dutch are prepared to look at their role in the slave trade. Are we?”

Another applauded the Dutch royal family’s involvement. “That recognition is being PROMOTED by the Dutch royal family and other institutions, not dismissed as ‘woke’ or ‘contested’,” he wrote.

Dutch traders are known to have shipped more than 600,000 African people to North and South America, and between 660,000 and 1.1 million people around the Indian Ocean, before the Netherlands officially abolished slavery in the colonies of Suriname and the Dutch Antilles in July 1863.

There has been a recent push by the nation’s royal family, and key cultural Dutch institutions, to acknowledge the scale of the country’s involvement in the exploitation of enslaved people.

Last year, King Willem-Alexander apologised for the “excessive violence” inflicted on Indonesia during his country’s colonial rule, making it the monarchy’s first such admission of regret to the southeast Asian nation.

Institutions in other countries, such as the UK, have made similar gestures, with the Bank of England last year apologising for the part played in slavery by some of its former governors, following global demands for accountability after conversations sparked by the Black Lives Matter movement last summer.