Karwan Fatah-Black
Biographic Data
| ID | 2570622 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Karwan Fatah-Black |
| GIVEN NAMES | Karwan |
| FAMILY NAME | Fatah-Black |
| SIGNATURE | FATAH-BLACK K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Leiden University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2788-6270 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 44 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Nicholas Radburn, Traders in Men. Merchants and the Transformation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
TSEG (Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis) - The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, is het Nederlands-Vlaamse vaktijdschrift op het gebied van de sociale en economische geschiedenis
‘Oh Dutchmen, Defer this Catastrophe’: The Haitian Revolution and the Decline of Abolitionism in the Netherlands, ca. 1790-1840
‘Oh Dutchmen, defer this catastrophe’ wrote a former Dutch plantation owner commenting on the temporary abolition of slavery in the French empire in 1794. It seems that his advice was heeded, as it took close to 70 more years to abolish Dutch slavery. Strangely, however, the successful defence of slavery does not feature prominently in the historiographical debate over the late abolition of Dutch slavery. This article ventures to explore the ideo…
Repentance and Reappraisal: Historicising the Defenders of Slavery in the Netherlands
In this introduction to a special issue on the history of anti-abolitionism in the Netherlands, the 160th anniversary of the Dutch abolition of slavery is discussed in relation to the culture of commemoration in the Netherlands and the international historiography of abolition. A reappraisal of the role of the State in the commemoration of slavery coincides with a more critical view of history and a change in perspective on the colonial past. The…
What is Manumission? A Manumittee-Centric Model of the Manumission Process in Eighteenth-Century Surinam
Manumission is the release from slavery, and therefore, a transition from the most extreme form of subjugation into another position and status in society. Some historians have defined manumission as a formal act, often understood as a gift that severed the bond between slave and master. More recently researchers have emphasized that it was a lengthy process that involved pre-existing dependencies and resulted in new hierarchies. This article tak…
The Future of the Dutch Colonial Past: Curating Heritage, Art and Activism
Institutions across the globe are increasingly questioned on how their foundations are rooted in colonialism and how they aim to ‘decolonize’. The Future of the Dutch Colonial Past provides an overview of critical scholarly reflections on the history of Dutch slavery and colonization, as well as how this translates into critical cultural practices. It also explores possible futures: What can heritage institutions learn from (international) best p…
Appropriating Anton de Kom Today
This essay explores the renewed attention for Anton de Kom and the ways this engagement revisits older questions about his life and work and opens new avenues for inquiry. This renewed interest has led to new forms of appropriation: the use of his likeness and his name by institutions to communicate a connection between the meanings attached to De Kom and the institution. These societal uses of De Kom in turn shape the meanings ascribed to him, r…
The Power of Procedure: Punishment of Slaves and the Administration of Justice in Suriname, 1669–1869
While contemporary observers judged Suriname’s legal system to be extremely cruel, arbitrary, and above all outrageously biased, the written record reveals that its criminal court closely adhered to procedure, weighed slave testimony and did not cast judgement outright. This article asks what place slave punishment and legal procedure had in the Suriname system of slavery, and how and why this changed over time. The Suriname legal system offers a…
An Intellectual on a Mission: Abdullah Jalal Fatah, his dissertation on Kurdish culture (1978) and heritage making inspired by Józef Chałasiński and Polish academia
The paper presents a previously unknown doctoral dissertation prepared in the 1970s in Polish by Abdullah Jalal Fatah under the guidance of Polish sociologist Józef Chałasiński. The thesis, entitled ‘Development and Dissemination of the Kurdish Culture in Iraq’, bears the mark of communist ideology but also of Polish heritagisation, in which culture and intellectuals became an important driving force in the process of nation-building and in seeki…
Introduction: Urban Slavery in the Age of Abolition
This Special Issue collects articles on urban slavery in the Atlantic world during the time when the institution of slavery was being abolished globally (c.1770s–c.1880s). At the time of abolition, most slaves were held on plantations, but this did not mean that the urban context of slavery was unimportant. In the cities of the Atlantic world, slavery was pervasive, and the cities themselves played an important role in the functioning of the slav…
Shipbuilding and repair in eighteenth-century Suriname
Suriname’s pre-modern economy was entirely dependent on water transport. While shipbuilding in the colony itself was not encouraged by the directors of the Suriname Company (1683–1795) in Amsterdam there was a need to support the colony’s transoceanic, regional and local transport. This article finds that Suriname certainly had an infrastructure for shipbuilding and repair, but its existence has been neglected in the historiography. Since there i…
The use of wills in community formation by former slaves in Suriname, 1750–1775
This article investigates how the manumitted in Suriname used wills and testaments to construct their social worlds. Wills enabled the manumitted to transmit their possessions and instructed those who survived them how to care for each other. Historians have made different assessments of the community of freedmen in Suriname, either seeing an anti-slavery solidarity among them or a vicious use of the institution of slavery even with regard to clo…
Curbing Sea Marauders and their Landed Accomplices
Mark Hanna has written a definitive account of the role of sea marauding and its suppression in the formation of the Atlantic British Empire. By tracing the ways in which the question of sea marauding was bound up with the formation of the British empire, Hanna breaks free from the overemphasis on the maritime aspect of piracy and the overly ideological treatment of piracy as an act of resistance. Hanna digs into the negotiated development of for…
Rode deletie: De verstomde herinnering aan het communisme van Anton de Kom
Red erasure. The silenced memory of Anton de Kom’s communism In 1934 the Afro-Surinamese author and activist Anton de Kom published his Wij slaven van Suriname (We Slaves of Surinam). De Kom drew inspiration from his experience and life in Surinam, as well as from the writings of abolitionist authors and the communist and anti-imperialist circles in which he moved while in Europe. Back in Surinam he was accused of plotting to overthrow the coloni…
The usurpation of legal roles by Suriname’s Governing Council, 1669–1816
Suriname was one of the most emblematic slave societies of the Atlantic world and saw a court system in which a Governing Council functioned simultaneously as political council to the governor, as a criminal court and also elected the Civil Court. Studies of the practice of the Governing Council have been limited to a small number of spectacularly brutal cases canonised by abolitionist campaigners. This article reconstructs how various forums for…
De Nederlandse smokkelhandel, 1600-1800
TSEG (Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis) - The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, is het Nederlands-Vlaamse vaktijdschrift op het gebied van de sociale en economische geschiedenis
The supreme power of the people”: Local autonomy and radical democracy in the Batavian revolution (1795–1798)
The Batavian Revolution of 1795 that overthrew the old stadtholderly regime of the Dutch Republic was followed by a period of intense political conflict in which popular mobilization played a key role. Among revolutionary elites, the main dividing line between moderates and radicals occurred around questions concerning the reorganization of the state apparatus and the writing of a new constitution. A full rejection of the federative model of the …
Explorations in History and Globalization
List of contributors. List of maps. List of figures. List of tables. Introduction Catia Antunes and Karwan Fatah-Black Part 1: Exchanges and Movements 1. Ecological exchanges and environmental history Chris Gratien 2. Connecting the world: migration and globalization in the second millennium Leo Lucassen 3. Redirecting global labor history? Matthias van Rossum 4. Trading networks in global history Claude Markovits 5. Missionary movements and the …
A profitable debate
Our gross margins approach is a blunt tool, which has – far more than we expected – improved scholarly understanding of the direct and indirect economic impact of the slave trade.1 The authors of t
Being speculative is better than to not do it at all”: An interview with Natalie Zemon Davis
Jessica Roitman and Karwan Fatah-Black meet Natalie Zemon Davis outside the University Library in Leiden for lunch and an interview. Although Davis is eager to study a Sranan-German dictionary she retrieved from the library, the three of them sit down for an engaging conversation on the historian’s craft, its societal relevance and the future of early modern studies
White Lies and Black Markets: Evading Metropolitan Authority in Colonial Suriname, 1650-1800
In White Lies and Black Markets, Fatah-Black offers a new account of the colonization of Suriname—one of the major European plantation colonies on the Guiana Coast—in the period between 1650-1800. While commonly portrayed as an isolated tropical outpost, this study places the colony in the context of its connections to the rest of the Atlantic world. These economic and migratory links assured the colony’s survival, but also created many incentive…
Paramaribo as Dutch and Atlantic Nodal Point, 1640–1795
1 Octroy ofte fondamentele conditien, onder de welcke haer Hoogh.Mog.ten besten en voordeele van de Ingezetenen deser Landen de Colonie van Suriname hebben doen vallen in
The Patriot Coup D’état in Curaçao, 1796
Slavery and race were not the only contentious issues shaking up Curaao in the Age of Revolutions. Violent confrontations between the military and the urban free whites and coloureds of Willemstad had preceded the 1795 slave revolt. In the years following the revolt, urban oppositional movements had a profound impact on island politics. These conflicts highlight the depth of the political instability on Curaao in an uncertain geopolitical context…
Ruud Paesie en Hubregt Kempe, Voor zilver en Zeeuws belang: De rampzalige Zuid- zee-expeditie van de Middelburgse Commercie Compagnie, 1724-1727
TSEG (Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis) - The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, is het Nederlands-Vlaamse vaktijdschrift op het gebied van de sociale en economische geschiedenis
Beyond Profitability: The Dutch Transatlantic Slave Trade and its Economic Impact
Dutch research into the slave trade and its importance to the Dutch economy has often limited itself to investigating the financial success of slave trading companies, calculating the success of slaving by its profit rates. The central argument made in this article is that gross margin is a better indicator for the importance of the slave trade to the Dutch Republic. Even if a slave trading company did not make a net profit on a voyage, such a vo…
Orangism, Patriotism, and Slavery in Curaçao, 1795–1796
T he defeat of the Dutch armies by the French and the founding of the Batavian Republic in 1795 created confusion in the colonies and on overseas naval vessels about who was in power. The Stadtholder fled to England and ordered troops and colonial governments to surrender to the British, while the Batavian government demanded that they abjure the oath to the Stadtholder. The ensuing confusion gave those on board Dutch naval vessels overseas, and …
Beyond Profitability: The Dutch Transatlantic Slave Trade and its Economic Impact
Dutch research into the slave trade and its importance to the Dutch economy has often limited itself to investigating the financial success of slave trading companies, calculating the success of slaving by its profit rates. The central argument made in this article is that gross margin is a better indicator for the importance of the slave trade to the Dutch Republic. Even if a slave trading company did not make a net profit on a voyage, such a vo…
White Lies and Black Markets: Evading Metropolitan Authority in Colonial Suriname, 1650-1800
In White Lies and Black Markets, Fatah-Black offers a new account of the colonization of Suriname—one of the major European plantation colonies on the Guiana Coast—in the period between 1650-1800. While commonly portrayed as an isolated tropical outpost, this study places the colony in the context of its connections to the rest of the Atlantic world. These economic and migratory links assured the colony’s survival, but also created many incentive…
Explorations in History and Globalization
List of contributors. List of maps. List of figures. List of tables. Introduction Catia Antunes and Karwan Fatah-Black Part 1: Exchanges and Movements 1. Ecological exchanges and environmental history Chris Gratien 2. Connecting the world: migration and globalization in the second millennium Leo Lucassen 3. Redirecting global labor history? Matthias van Rossum 4. Trading networks in global history Claude Markovits 5. Missionary movements and the …
Introduction: Urban Slavery in the Age of Abolition
This Special Issue collects articles on urban slavery in the Atlantic world during the time when the institution of slavery was being abolished globally (c.1770s–c.1880s). At the time of abolition, most slaves were held on plantations, but this did not mean that the urban context of slavery was unimportant. In the cities of the Atlantic world, slavery was pervasive, and the cities themselves played an important role in the functioning of the slav…
The use of wills in community formation by former slaves in Suriname, 1750–1775
This article investigates how the manumitted in Suriname used wills and testaments to construct their social worlds. Wills enabled the manumitted to transmit their possessions and instructed those who survived them how to care for each other. Historians have made different assessments of the community of freedmen in Suriname, either seeing an anti-slavery solidarity among them or a vicious use of the institution of slavery even with regard to clo…
Being speculative is better than to not do it at all”: An interview with Natalie Zemon Davis
Jessica Roitman and Karwan Fatah-Black meet Natalie Zemon Davis outside the University Library in Leiden for lunch and an interview. Although Davis is eager to study a Sranan-German dictionary she retrieved from the library, the three of them sit down for an engaging conversation on the historian’s craft, its societal relevance and the future of early modern studies
The Future of the Dutch Colonial Past: Curating Heritage, Art and Activism
Institutions across the globe are increasingly questioned on how their foundations are rooted in colonialism and how they aim to ‘decolonize’. The Future of the Dutch Colonial Past provides an overview of critical scholarly reflections on the history of Dutch slavery and colonization, as well as how this translates into critical cultural practices. It also explores possible futures: What can heritage institutions learn from (international) best p…
The usurpation of legal roles by Suriname’s Governing Council, 1669–1816
Suriname was one of the most emblematic slave societies of the Atlantic world and saw a court system in which a Governing Council functioned simultaneously as political council to the governor, as a criminal court and also elected the Civil Court. Studies of the practice of the Governing Council have been limited to a small number of spectacularly brutal cases canonised by abolitionist campaigners. This article reconstructs how various forums for…
A Swiss Village in the Dutch Tropics: The Limitations of Empire-Centred Approaches to the Early Modern Atlantic World
This article considers what the migration circuits to and from Suriname can tell us about Dutch early modern colonisation in the Atlantic world. Did the Dutch have an Atlantic empire that can be studied by treating it as an integrated space, as suggested by New Imperial Historians, or did colonisation rely on circuits outside Dutch control, stretching beyond its imperial space? An empire-centred approach has dominated the study of Suriname’s hist…
Shipbuilding and repair in eighteenth-century Suriname
Suriname’s pre-modern economy was entirely dependent on water transport. While shipbuilding in the colony itself was not encouraged by the directors of the Suriname Company (1683–1795) in Amsterdam there was a need to support the colony’s transoceanic, regional and local transport. This article finds that Suriname certainly had an infrastructure for shipbuilding and repair, but its existence has been neglected in the historiography. Since there i…
The supreme power of the people”: Local autonomy and radical democracy in the Batavian revolution (1795–1798)
The Batavian Revolution of 1795 that overthrew the old stadtholderly regime of the Dutch Republic was followed by a period of intense political conflict in which popular mobilization played a key role. Among revolutionary elites, the main dividing line between moderates and radicals occurred around questions concerning the reorganization of the state apparatus and the writing of a new constitution. A full rejection of the federative model of the …
A profitable debate
Our gross margins approach is a blunt tool, which has – far more than we expected – improved scholarly understanding of the direct and indirect economic impact of the slave trade.1 The authors of t
Wat is winst? De economische impact van de Nederlandse trans-Atlantische slavenhande
TSEG (Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis) - The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, is het Nederlands-Vlaamse vaktijdschrift op het gebied van de sociale en economische geschiedenis
Slaves and Sailors on Suriname's Rivers
On transatlantic slave ships the Africans were predominantly there as cargo, while Europeans worked the deadly job of sailing and securing the vessel. On the plantations the roles changed, and the slaves were transformed into a workforce. European sailors and African slaves in the Atlantic world mostly encountered each other aboard slave ships as captive and captor. Once the enslaved arrived on the plantations new hierarchies and divisions of lab…
Een marginale bijdrage? Repliek: Van 'winstgevendheid' naar de economische impact van de Nederlandse trans-Atlantische slavenhandel
TSEG (Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis) - The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, is het Nederlands-Vlaamse vaktijdschrift op het gebied van de sociale en economische geschiedenis
Wat is winst? De economische impact van de Nederlandse trans-Atlantische slavenhande
TSEG (Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis) - The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, is het Nederlands-Vlaamse vaktijdschrift op het gebied van de sociale en economische geschiedenis
Slaves and Sailors on Suriname's Rivers
On transatlantic slave ships the Africans were predominantly there as cargo, while Europeans worked the deadly job of sailing and securing the vessel. On the plantations the roles changed, and the slaves were transformed into a workforce. European sailors and African slaves in the Atlantic world mostly encountered each other aboard slave ships as captive and captor. Once the enslaved arrived on the plantations new hierarchies and divisions of lab…
Orangism, Patriotism, and Slavery in Curaçao, 1795–1796
T he defeat of the Dutch armies by the French and the founding of the Batavian Republic in 1795 created confusion in the colonies and on overseas naval vessels about who was in power. The Stadtholder fled to England and ordered troops and colonial governments to surrender to the British, while the Batavian government demanded that they abjure the oath to the Stadtholder. The ensuing confusion gave those on board Dutch naval vessels overseas, and …
A Swiss Village in the Dutch Tropics: The Limitations of Empire-Centred Approaches to the Early Modern Atlantic World
This article considers what the migration circuits to and from Suriname can tell us about Dutch early modern colonisation in the Atlantic world. Did the Dutch have an Atlantic empire that can be studied by treating it as an integrated space, as suggested by New Imperial Historians, or did colonisation rely on circuits outside Dutch control, stretching beyond its imperial space? An empire-centred approach has dominated the study of Suriname’s hist…
Paramaribo as Dutch and Atlantic Nodal Point, 1640–1795
1 Octroy ofte fondamentele conditien, onder de welcke haer Hoogh.Mog.ten besten en voordeele van de Ingezetenen deser Landen de Colonie van Suriname hebben doen vallen in
The Patriot Coup D’état in Curaçao, 1796
Slavery and race were not the only contentious issues shaking up Curaao in the Age of Revolutions. Violent confrontations between the military and the urban free whites and coloureds of Willemstad had preceded the 1795 slave revolt. In the years following the revolt, urban oppositional movements had a profound impact on island politics. These conflicts highlight the depth of the political instability on Curaao in an uncertain geopolitical context…
Ruud Paesie en Hubregt Kempe, Voor zilver en Zeeuws belang: De rampzalige Zuid- zee-expeditie van de Middelburgse Commercie Compagnie, 1724-1727
TSEG (Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis) - The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, is het Nederlands-Vlaamse vaktijdschrift op het gebied van de sociale en economische geschiedenis
Beyond Profitability: The Dutch Transatlantic Slave Trade and its Economic Impact
Dutch research into the slave trade and its importance to the Dutch economy has often limited itself to investigating the financial success of slave trading companies, calculating the success of slaving by its profit rates. The central argument made in this article is that gross margin is a better indicator for the importance of the slave trade to the Dutch Republic. Even if a slave trading company did not make a net profit on a voyage, such a vo…
Being speculative is better than to not do it at all”: An interview with Natalie Zemon Davis
Jessica Roitman and Karwan Fatah-Black meet Natalie Zemon Davis outside the University Library in Leiden for lunch and an interview. Although Davis is eager to study a Sranan-German dictionary she retrieved from the library, the three of them sit down for an engaging conversation on the historian’s craft, its societal relevance and the future of early modern studies
White Lies and Black Markets: Evading Metropolitan Authority in Colonial Suriname, 1650-1800
In White Lies and Black Markets, Fatah-Black offers a new account of the colonization of Suriname—one of the major European plantation colonies on the Guiana Coast—in the period between 1650-1800. While commonly portrayed as an isolated tropical outpost, this study places the colony in the context of its connections to the rest of the Atlantic world. These economic and migratory links assured the colony’s survival, but also created many incentive…
De Nederlandse smokkelhandel, 1600-1800
TSEG (Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis) - The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, is het Nederlands-Vlaamse vaktijdschrift op het gebied van de sociale en economische geschiedenis
The supreme power of the people”: Local autonomy and radical democracy in the Batavian revolution (1795–1798)
The Batavian Revolution of 1795 that overthrew the old stadtholderly regime of the Dutch Republic was followed by a period of intense political conflict in which popular mobilization played a key role. Among revolutionary elites, the main dividing line between moderates and radicals occurred around questions concerning the reorganization of the state apparatus and the writing of a new constitution. A full rejection of the federative model of the …
Explorations in History and Globalization
List of contributors. List of maps. List of figures. List of tables. Introduction Catia Antunes and Karwan Fatah-Black Part 1: Exchanges and Movements 1. Ecological exchanges and environmental history Chris Gratien 2. Connecting the world: migration and globalization in the second millennium Leo Lucassen 3. Redirecting global labor history? Matthias van Rossum 4. Trading networks in global history Claude Markovits 5. Missionary movements and the …
A profitable debate
Our gross margins approach is a blunt tool, which has – far more than we expected – improved scholarly understanding of the direct and indirect economic impact of the slave trade.1 The authors of t
Curbing Sea Marauders and their Landed Accomplices
Mark Hanna has written a definitive account of the role of sea marauding and its suppression in the formation of the Atlantic British Empire. By tracing the ways in which the question of sea marauding was bound up with the formation of the British empire, Hanna breaks free from the overemphasis on the maritime aspect of piracy and the overly ideological treatment of piracy as an act of resistance. Hanna digs into the negotiated development of for…
Rode deletie: De verstomde herinnering aan het communisme van Anton de Kom
Red erasure. The silenced memory of Anton de Kom’s communism In 1934 the Afro-Surinamese author and activist Anton de Kom published his Wij slaven van Suriname (We Slaves of Surinam). De Kom drew inspiration from his experience and life in Surinam, as well as from the writings of abolitionist authors and the communist and anti-imperialist circles in which he moved while in Europe. Back in Surinam he was accused of plotting to overthrow the coloni…
The usurpation of legal roles by Suriname’s Governing Council, 1669–1816
Suriname was one of the most emblematic slave societies of the Atlantic world and saw a court system in which a Governing Council functioned simultaneously as political council to the governor, as a criminal court and also elected the Civil Court. Studies of the practice of the Governing Council have been limited to a small number of spectacularly brutal cases canonised by abolitionist campaigners. This article reconstructs how various forums for…
Shipbuilding and repair in eighteenth-century Suriname
Suriname’s pre-modern economy was entirely dependent on water transport. While shipbuilding in the colony itself was not encouraged by the directors of the Suriname Company (1683–1795) in Amsterdam there was a need to support the colony’s transoceanic, regional and local transport. This article finds that Suriname certainly had an infrastructure for shipbuilding and repair, but its existence has been neglected in the historiography. Since there i…
The use of wills in community formation by former slaves in Suriname, 1750–1775
This article investigates how the manumitted in Suriname used wills and testaments to construct their social worlds. Wills enabled the manumitted to transmit their possessions and instructed those who survived them how to care for each other. Historians have made different assessments of the community of freedmen in Suriname, either seeing an anti-slavery solidarity among them or a vicious use of the institution of slavery even with regard to clo…
Introduction: Urban Slavery in the Age of Abolition
This Special Issue collects articles on urban slavery in the Atlantic world during the time when the institution of slavery was being abolished globally (c.1770s–c.1880s). At the time of abolition, most slaves were held on plantations, but this did not mean that the urban context of slavery was unimportant. In the cities of the Atlantic world, slavery was pervasive, and the cities themselves played an important role in the functioning of the slav…
An Intellectual on a Mission: Abdullah Jalal Fatah, his dissertation on Kurdish culture (1978) and heritage making inspired by Józef Chałasiński and Polish academia
The paper presents a previously unknown doctoral dissertation prepared in the 1970s in Polish by Abdullah Jalal Fatah under the guidance of Polish sociologist Józef Chałasiński. The thesis, entitled ‘Development and Dissemination of the Kurdish Culture in Iraq’, bears the mark of communist ideology but also of Polish heritagisation, in which culture and intellectuals became an important driving force in the process of nation-building and in seeki…
The Power of Procedure: Punishment of Slaves and the Administration of Justice in Suriname, 1669–1869
While contemporary observers judged Suriname’s legal system to be extremely cruel, arbitrary, and above all outrageously biased, the written record reveals that its criminal court closely adhered to procedure, weighed slave testimony and did not cast judgement outright. This article asks what place slave punishment and legal procedure had in the Suriname system of slavery, and how and why this changed over time. The Suriname legal system offers a…
Appropriating Anton de Kom Today
This essay explores the renewed attention for Anton de Kom and the ways this engagement revisits older questions about his life and work and opens new avenues for inquiry. This renewed interest has led to new forms of appropriation: the use of his likeness and his name by institutions to communicate a connection between the meanings attached to De Kom and the institution. These societal uses of De Kom in turn shape the meanings ascribed to him, r…
‘Oh Dutchmen, Defer this Catastrophe’: The Haitian Revolution and the Decline of Abolitionism in the Netherlands, ca. 1790-1840
‘Oh Dutchmen, defer this catastrophe’ wrote a former Dutch plantation owner commenting on the temporary abolition of slavery in the French empire in 1794. It seems that his advice was heeded, as it took close to 70 more years to abolish Dutch slavery. Strangely, however, the successful defence of slavery does not feature prominently in the historiographical debate over the late abolition of Dutch slavery. This article ventures to explore the ideo…
Colonialism, slavery, and trade (19 works) · Political science (19 works) · History (17 works) · History (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Art (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Archaeology (7 works)