In October 1740, a tragedy unfolded in Batavia, the Asian headquarters of the Dutch East India Company on the island of Java. Faced with a spontaneous Chinese peasant uprising, Batavia’s vengeful inhabitants carried out a bloody massacre of their fellow Chinese within the city walls. The murderers marched from house to house, looting and pillaging, not even sparing the hospitals and prisons.

How could such a slaughter take place in the prosperous Queen of the East? Drawing on a wealth of Du...

It is the paradox at the heart of the Dutch Republic: how could a state emerge from resistance to political slavery and subjugation by a foreign power, only to become a colonial empire that promoted slavery all over the world? Slavery and the Dutch State shows how the modern Dutch state and its predecessors were complicit in colonial slavery. It describes the roles of various actors, such as enslaved people, administrators and merchants in the Netherlands and the colonized societies. More tha...