Enslaved People Arriving in Middelburg, 1596

When the northern Low Countries broke away from Spanish rule in the late sixteenth century, the shift was felt far beyond Europe. What had once been a relatively faraway region within the vast Habsburg Empire—largely focused on Baltic trade—quickly became a rising maritime power. At sea, Dutch ships challenged Spanish dominance by attacking shipping routes that carried colonial goods from the Americas and Africa to Europe. This naval expansion would soon bind the young Republic to colonial exploitation and slavery.

The jurist Hugo Grotius famously argued that slavery no longer existed as a lawful institution in the Netherlands. Practice tells a different story. Enslaved people appeared in the Republic not only as prisoners of war but also as commodities, and private law was increasingly used to protect the property claims of those who owned them.

By the 1590s, Dutch ships were routinely involved in slave transport. In 1594, a skipper from Zutphen delivered what sources described as “a barge full of slaves” to Cape Verde. A year later, Dutch vessels off the coast of Guinea encountered several ships carrying “sugar and blacks” under the command of a Dutch captain, who transported the enslaved people to Lisbon. In 1596, an Amsterdam captain carried fifty-eight enslaved Africans from Angola to southern Portugal on behalf of a Portuguese merchant. These voyages show how deeply Dutch maritime activity was already entangled with Atlantic slavery.

That same expansion brought enslaved Africans directly to the Netherlands. In 1596, at least one hundred enslaved people were landed in the port city of Middelburg. They had likely been captured during a privateering expedition or purchased in Guinea for resale in Brazil. The city council ordered their release, and Middelburg’s mayor, Adriaen Heindricxsen ten Haeff—also a founding director of the VOC—publicly supported this decision. He argued before the States of Zeeland that the men, women, and children brought from Guinea were baptized Christians and therefore could not be lawfully enslaved. No one, he insisted, could claim ownership over them.

The provincial authorities initially agreed, but the Africans’ freedom did not last. Pieter van der Haegen, a wealthy Rotterdam merchant and shipowner, appealed to the States-General, the highest governing body of the Republic. Although his first petition was rejected, the States-General soon reversed course. Within two weeks of the Africans’ arrival, it ruled that Van der Haegen could dispose of them “as he pleases,” and Zeeland was forced to comply. In doing so, the States-General placed the property rights of a Dutch citizen above the idea that freedom prevailed over slavery on Dutch soil.

Meanwhile, Dutch overseas ambitions were expanding even further. In the same year, a fleet led by Cornelis de Houtman sailed past the Cape of Good Hope for the first time, opening a direct route to Southeast Asia. During this voyage, two men—known as Laurens and Madagascar—were enslaved by the crew and taken to the Republic. They arrived in August 1597 near Texel, alongside Dutch and Asian sailors. On a later voyage, Laurens, identified as coming from Madagascar, was baptized.

The return in Amsterdam of the second voyage to the East Indies, under the leadership of Jacobus van Neck, on July 19, 1599. The four large ships Mauritius, Hollandia, Overijssel and Vriesland on the IJ surrounded by numerous small boats. In the distance on the right the profile of Amsterdam. Hendrik Cornelisz Vroom (1566–1640), 1599, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

The journey that brought Laurens to Holland is often seen as the beginning of a new era. Over the following decades, the Dutch Republic would become the center of a global empire, stretching from Asia to the Americas and supported by trading posts around the world. Slavery became firmly embedded in the economic system of exploitation and the laws of the overseas colonies—and increasingly, it also became a legal issue in the Republic's territories in Europe, because it was a privilege of high-ranking officials to bring enslaved people with them to Europe, where they could serve as domestic attendants, sexual property, or symbols of status.

(Detailed data and references in footnotes can be found in Bastiaan D. van der Velden – The Legal Framework of Slavery in the Dutch Republic and Its Colonies, 2026)