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  • The Dutch Slave Trade, 1500-1850
  • Diana Raesner
P. C. Emmer, Chris Emery, trans. The Dutch Slave Trade, 1500–1850. New York: Berghahn Books, 2006. ix + 166 pp. ISBN 1-84545-031-0, $75.00 (hardcover).

This slim volume by Pieter C. Emmer, with a nice translation by Chris Emery, sets its major focus on the Dutch participation in the Atlantic slave trade from roughly 1620 to 1860. General discussions of the slave trade and slavery in the Americas can oftentimes overlook this small country's role, concentrating instead on such larger players as England, France, Portugal, and Spain. In this book, Emmer not only [End Page 406] wants to emphasize the Dutch position, but he also uses the book as a platform for highlighting what he calls "a great injustice of history," which occurred concurrently with the Golden Age of the Netherlands. The editorial remarks are intended mostly for the national Dutch audience, but the general information he provides translates well to an international readership.

Emmer's use of statistics and data from the Dutch overseas companies, namely, the Dutch West Indies Company (WIC) and the Middelburg Commercial Company, serves to point out the depth and breadth of Dutch involvement in the slave trade. Unlike The Dutch East India Company, WIC did not have a monopoly over the trade (post-1730) and had to compete in a more or less open market for its slaves on the west coast of Africa. Drawing mostly from secondary sources, including his own body of work, Emmer weaves the story of how Dutch slavers came to prominence in the second quarter of the seventeenth century. He writes that the Dutch were at least partially responsible for introducing sugar cultivation to the English and French Caribbean, a crop that requires enormous amounts of labor. The Dutch were able to successfully supply the slaves needed in these plantation economies, although as the seventeenth century waned, their position as a supplier became less and less important. Emmer's analysis of the numbers clearly argues that the Dutch slave trade and the large-scale plantations in the colony of Suriname were unprofitable ventures for the greater part of their existences. He shows that most ships' voyages operated at a loss and that by 1773 the credit with which plantation owners bought their slaves culminated in a financial crisis. This work supports previous studies that have also examined the economic benefits of the Atlantic slave trade in the Caribbean and found the profits to be lacking for both slaver and sugar plantation owner.

The analysis of available data indicates how unprofitable the slaving ventures were and leads Emmer to conclude that the Atlantic slave trade had an insignificant effect on the economic development and the demographics of Africa. He calculates that 11 million slaves were exported to the Americas during the entire period of the Atlantic slave trade, which averages to about thirty thousand per year (he estimates total population of West Africa to be 20 million). African slave dealers would have seen very little economic return for the sale, but Emmer also states that the demographics of the area would hardly have been affected. To offer some perspective, he compares the forced movement of African slaves to the massive European emigrations, more than 60 million individuals, of the nineteenth century and their negative effects on demographics and economy in Europe. Such juxtapositions of two wildly disparate events, in scale, duration, and time [End Page 407] period, takes the cultural practice of the slave trade out of context. Although he acknowledges that societal roles for Europe's laboring poor and African slaves were not the same, the general working conditions of slaves on plantations and the high mortality rate they suffered were "less exceptional than we might think." (p. 110) Emmer's goal is to point out that unfortunately the trade in humans proved to be a fruitless venture for Europeans and Africans alike. His presentation of the data seems to mitigate the processes and actions surrounding Europe's involvement in the slave trade; namely, while Europeans companies were buying slaves, a large swath of the European population was suffering, too.

In addition, the book relies...

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