Bastiaan D. van der Velden - Publications & Research
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Free Air & Free Soil?
A claim that there "was no slavery in the Dutch Republic” has been repeated time after time, yet the historical and legal record tells a different story.
To assess the status of enslaved individuals in the Republic, Guideline 5 of the Bellagio–Harvard Guidelines is essential: determining whether slavery exists does not depend solely on what a state declares. Although statements by legal experts—or even legislation—asserting that slavery did not exist can be considered, they are not conclusive.
Guideline 6 of the Bellagio–Harvard Guidelines provides a sounder criterion: a state that says it prohibits slavery must expropriate anyone claiming ownership rights over another person. No such rule existed anywhere in the Dutch Republic. On the contrary, courts and the States-General consistently prioritized the property rights of slave owners over the personal freedom of enslaved individuals.
A wide range of historical sources contradicts the idea that slavery was absent, forbidden, or illegal: notarial deeds, court cases, VOC and WIC records, resolutions of the States-General, and visual evidence by Golden Age painters all point to the presence of hundreds—perhaps thousands—of enslaved people in cities such as Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht, and Maastricht between 1650 and 1800. These sources expose the weakness of the long-standing legal assertion that slavery had “disappeared” from Dutch territory.
Even if we assume (like the Dutch King did in 2023) that such a prohibition existed in positive law, the strength of the Bellagio–Harvard Guidelines lies in their capacity to examine all private-law mechanisms that facilitated slavery, allowing for a more complete understanding of the phenomenon. Was it possible to sell a person in Holland? Could you inherit a woman in Rotterdam? Could a child be manumitted in Utrecht?
Grotius and many later Roman-Dutch jurists insisted that slavery was no longer present in the Republic—a claim (that might have been true in 1610) based not on legislation but on an argument from authority rooted in tradition. Yet this tradition was fundamentally disrupted when enslaved prisoners of war and enslaved individuals from the colonies were brought into the Republic itself.
In practice, Roman-Dutch lawyers largely avoided confronting the core issues at stake. From the earliest phases of colonization, slavery was treated as an economic necessity in overseas territories. It became deeply embedded in colonial society, where the property rights of slave owners—and the financial interests of merchants and investors in the Republic—took precedence over the freedoms of enslaved people. This property was exported to the Republic, where these property rights were fully recognized.
The legal profession’s strong trust in authority, combined with the acceptance of slavery under Roman jus gentium and the central role of Roman law in university education in the Republic, made it easy for jurists to accept slavery as a legitimate legal status.
Painting below: Family portrait, presumably of the family of Joos van Trappen, known as Banckers, Vice Admiral of Zeeland, circa 1635, by Willem Cornelisz Duyster (1599–1635), Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.
