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

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. …