At least 3.3m people were victims of Dutch enslavement, research claims

The National Slavery Monument in Amsterdam. There are calls for the country to follow up on apologies from the king and the former prime minister with action. Photograph: Peter Dejong/AP View image in fullscreen The National Slavery Monument in Amsterdam. There are calls for the country to follow up on apologies from the king and the former prime minister with action. Photograph: Peter Dejong/AP At least 3.3m people were victims of Dutch enslavement, research claims Figure is more than five times the widely used 600,000 figure widely cited in apologies by king and politicians At least 3.3 million people were enslaved in the Netherlands during the transatlantic slave trade, research claims – more than five times the 600,000 figure widely used in history books and cited in apologies by the king and politicians. King Willem-Alexander referred to the more than 600,000 people who were brought from Africa on Dutch ships to be sold as enslaved people when he apologised three years ago for the role of the Netherlands in the transatlantic slave trade. In 2022 the then prime minister, Mark Rutte, cited the figure when he apologised for “the past actions of the Dutch state”. But according to a book by the Dutch investigative journalist Leendert van der Valk, that widely accepted figure is a gross underestimation of how many victims of Dutch enslavement there were, with the correct number being between 3.3 and 5.3 million people. Van der Valk said the 600,000 figure did not take into account all the places where the Dutch colonised or enslaved people, the full period of the country’s involvement, or include many who were born into enslavement. It also did not account for Indigenous people whom the Dutch met in some of the countries they colonised and later enslaved. For Peggy Brandon, a prominent Surinamese-born cultural leader and a curator of the Netherlands’ National Museum of Slavery , which is under development, the numbers matter. “What upsets me is that we never talk about the people who lived generation after generation within that system of enslavement,” she said. “We don’t talk about the people who sometimes killed their young children because they didn’t want them to grow up in enslavement.” Brandon said getting the numbers right was about humanising the people who were dehumanised by Europeans in an attempt to justify and normalise their abhorrent treatment of black people. She said this was an important step in challenging some of the colonial narratives that persist today. “It’s going back to the fact that these were human beings. And every person has a right to be seen and to be known. We don’t know their names. And we didn’t count them for the longest time,” she said. Van der Valk’s book, whose title translates as Forgotten places, Forgotten People – an Atlas of the Dutch History of Slavery, uses calculations and demographic research primarily from Radboud University, a highly ranked research institution in the Netherlands. Matthias van Rossu