It is hard to overstate the power the institution of marriage held in the VOC and WIC world. It could tie men to a continent, make the difference between being considered honorable or a fornicator, change someone’s ethnic status, provide social mobility or solidify property arrangements, and even have consequences for one’s labor obligations. As the prerequisite for the foundation of a legitimate family, marriage formed a primary vehicle through which wealth was transmitted and communities formed and reproduced themselves. The way in which the institution was governed, therefore, had considerable impact on the way people built a life within the complex multi-ethnic societies that formed in Dutch colonial settlements – and vice versa. This chapter traces how this exchange worked for the communities closest to the Dutch colonial institutions and centers of power: Christians.1 How did marriage shape the formation, reproduction, and boundaries of Christian colonial communities and thus inform what it meant to be ‘European’ in these highly mixed and mobile societies? And how did colonial residents and authorities – local and in the Dutch Republic – in turn give shape to Christian marriage? In order to answer these questions, this chapter will begin by exploring the fundamental relationship between marriage, population, and colonial power, before giving an overview of the early modern Dutch marriage legislation that formed the legal framework within which settlements under the VOC and WIC operated. It will then turn to an examination of locally issued colonial legislation and on-the-ground conflicts around access to marriage to show how racial and religious diversity, class hierarchies, and the element of slavery complicated questions of what Christian marriage meant, who it could include, and who had the power to decide this.
1
By the time the Dutch West India Company was founded in 1621, some two decades after the institution of its East Indian counterpart, the VOC, it was clear to those in the Dutch Republic setting their sights overseas – whether they were merchants, politicians, or clergy, and whether they were looking East or West – that the companies’ expansion across the Indian and Atlantic oceans would not strictly consist of trade missions. The VOC, in its attempt to establish a monopolistic position in its trade zone, had almost immediately resorted to the non-mercantile practices provided for in the 35th article of its charter – diplomacy and violence – in order to establish a basis of power in South-East Asia.2 In the 1610s and ‘20s, as the Company was increasingly supplementing treaties with conquests, debates arose around the role of populations – and specifically Dutch settler populations – as a basis for the company’s power.3 Although there was a general consensus that a loyal, self-sustaining and self-reproducing population base was key in retaining newly conquered lands, it was not a given how this was to be achieved.4 On an economic level, settlers presented a dilemma with regards to the company’s monopoly position: in order to support themselves (and thus indirectly support the expansion of the VOC’s monopolistic power in the trade zone) free settlers needed to be able to engage in a certain amount of private trade, but this went against the Company’s founding principle that no Dutchmen were to engage in Asian trade outside of the VOC.5 On a reproductive level, meanwhile, the question arose who was to make up the families that would sustain the population base of Dutch colonies. This is where women and marriage come into the picture, because while a steady stream of European men flowed into Asia in service of the Company, the same could not be said for European women.
Coen, too, however, was not satisfied with the Dutch women sent over to Batavia on his request. After the Company Directors responded to his pleas by starting the official policy of recruiting ‘Company Daughters’ as brides for higher-level company servants, Coen advised his employers against sending women of ill repute, ‘as there are already enough whores in these lands,’ and complained that no local women, free or enslaved, were as ‘unfit and ill-mannered as some of the daughters that arrived on these ships.’10 By 1632, the Compagniesdogters project was abandoned and twenty years later, in 1652, single women were even banned from making the voyage to Asia, rendering Dutch-born brides an almost-exclusive privilege of the highest-ranking company servants. Much of the economic backbone of Batavia and many other VOC settlements would be formed not by Dutch settler families, but by Chinese migrants, although the latter would be excluded from both company
For the West India Company, which had two decades of VOC-expansion as well as more than a century of Spanish and Portuguese colonization to look back on, it was always clear that the Americas, which formed the major part of its trade zone, would be the site of settlement as well as trade. From the 1620s through the early eighteenth century, the WIC expanded its reach in large part through a policy of allowing wealthy entrepreneurs to settle land in its charter zone and thus found their own, semi-private colonies under the WIC umbrella – a construction known as patroonschap.14 Patroons and WIC
As Dutch colonial efforts shifted from Brazil and New Netherland (where Dutch colonization had been considerably more successful) towards the Caribbean, the WIC and colonial authorities would continue to encourage white female migration, with mixed results. As late as 1762, the Society of Suriname pitched a plan similar to the Company Daughters project of the early seventeenth-century VOC: citing the problem of an insufficient number of ‘white womenfolk’ moving to Suriname, which prevented the colony’s growth, the Directors began negotiations with Amsterdam’s Aalmoezeniersweeshuis, the orphanage for the city’s poorest, and devised a plan. An initial number of twelve orphan girls, aged fourteen to twenty, would be sent to Paramaribo under chaperone, where they would reside and be educated in the local
Governor Crommelin of Suriname was tentatively enthusiastic upon hearing of the plan, citing the lack of European girls in the colony and the ‘mixing with black women’ that occurred as a result, but consulted with others in the colony.18 A report that came out of this consultation expressed reservations, writing, in a sentiment that echoed the Batavians’ disdain for the lower-class brides that had traveled to the East Indies a century prior, that the children from urban orphanages such as the Aalmoezeniersweeshuis were ‘listless and of unworkable nature due to an overly permissive education.’ The report did stress that the colony was in dire need of more (skilled) colonists, but that attracting them was difficult, especially since a recent settlement attempt involving a group of Swiss families had ended in disaster, with the newly founded village decimated by disease, starvation, and maroon attacks.19 There is no evidence that the Society’s plan ever came to fruition, although no less than 28 orphan girls volunteered to go.20 The proposal is emblematic, however, of the fact that colonial authorities, where plantation societies such as Suriname were concerned, never quite let go of the ideal of using racially and culturally white settler families as a tool in maintaining control over land and enslaved workers, even if this ideal was never fully reflected in colonial reality.
do not care in the least about Europeans unless it is in accordance with their own interests, and Your Honors can be assured that they will never, ever, allow Europeans to insert themselves into the hinterland; undertaking this through violence is impossible, because even if troops were to be sent out, what protection can be offered here? Very little, as the authority of Europeans in these lands does not stretch further than the reach of a cannonball. As a result, one would be surrendering such people to fall victim to a party of cruel Barbarians!22
The balance of power in West-Africa, it is clear, was vastly different from what it would be in centuries to come. Indeed, throughout the WIC’s tenure on the Guinean coast, very few Dutch women ever traveled to Elmina or any of the Company’s other outposts in Africa, and virtually no European man started a Christian family through formal marriage. The WIC on the Guinean coast thus offers an example of European expansion that can only tangentially be described as ‘colonial’, whether colonialism is conceived through the imposition of a foreign (e.g. European) power over an indigenous population or the introduction of foreign, self-reproducing settler communities.23
An additional dimension, that helps further specify the ‘settler-colonial’ dimension, is the degree to which colonizing populations were marked by transience or more permanent settlement, resulting in more or less stable communities. The VOC settlements in South and Southeast Asia and the WIC-colonies in the Caribbean that form the primary locus of this book were marked, in varying degrees, by a combination of settlement and transience, captured in the East Indies literature in the dual figures of the blijver (or ‘stayer’) and the trekker (sojourner).27
Because gender and marriage are key operatives in patterns of settlement, we can see some of this dynamic reflected in the marriage data recorded by the Dutch Reformed Church in Batavia, Cochin, Suriname and Curaçao. For each couple that wished to wed in church, local pastors wrote down the bride and groom’s names, witnesses, prior marital status, and – usually – place of birth. Although they do not give a comprehensive overview of the entire population, the distinct trends in places of birth in these ondertrouwregisters can give an indication of the relative ‘localization’ and dynamism of the Christian marriage market in these places, and thus of patterns in colonization.
The data for Batavia (Figure 2) supports the general picture given in the literature of increasing, strongly gendered, creolization: following an initial phase in which the majority of grooms and over a third of brides hailed from Europe, the pattern shifted, starting in the second half of the seventeenth century: with the change in policy regarding European female migration, the proportion of European brides dropped drastically and continued to fall throughout the eighteenth century.28 The number of European-born grooms also declined in
Batavia: place of birth of grooms and brides in the marriage records of the Dutch Reformed Church, 1616–1786. Source 1616–1639: H. E. Niemeijer, ‘Calvinisme en koloniale stadscultuur, Batavia 1619–1725’ (Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Amsterdam, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 1996), 42–43. Source other years: ANRI Burgerlijke Stand inv.nos. 84, 90, 91, 95. Nb the 117 grooms and 43 brides classified by Niemeijer based on their surname or patronym are listed under ‘unknown’ in this graph, as their place of birth cannot be determined with certainty (although it is likely they were born in Asia). ‘n’ in all tables stands for the total number of couples listed. ‘Europeans’ and ‘natives’ refer to distinctions made in the original source (Europeanen and inlanders)
Notably, in the middle part of the eighteenth century, the church records segregate couples into lists of ‘European’ and ‘native’ (inlandse) marriages, which offers us a unique insight into institutional perceptions of ethnic belonging. We see that, by the 1720s, European status was not exclusively determined by place of birth, as around a quarter of grooms and three quarters or
The data for Cochin (Figure 3), which is only available starting in the mid-eighteenth century, shows a pattern of even stronger (female) ‘localization’ and gender disparity than Batavia: the vast majority of brides hailed from the city of Cochin or elsewhere on the Malabar coast while the majority of grooms originated from Europe, consistent with the idea of a port city absorbing a steady stream of male newcomers (predominantly company servants), where continuity was provided by locally-born women of mixed descent.30 A remarkably similar pattern is shown for the port city of Willemstad in Curaçao (Figure 4) where brides, as early as the 1710s, were overwhelmingly locally born, while grooms were more likely to have crossed the Atlantic, especially in the first half of the eighteenth century. A notable difference between the Cochin
Cochin: place of birth of grooms and brides in the marriage records of the Dutch Reformed Church, 1753–1797. Source: Het Doop/Trouwboek van Cochin,’ Gens Nostra XLVII (January 1992), 1–31
Curaçao: place of birth of grooms and brides in the marriage records of the Dutch Reformed Church, 1714–1791. Source 1714–1721: ‘Extract Uit Het Trouwboek Der Gereformeerde Gemeente Op Het Eiland Curaçao van de Jaren 1714 Tot En Met 1722,’ in Vijfde Jaarlijksch Verslag van Het Geschied-, Taal-, Land- En Volkenkundig Genootschap, Gevestigd Te Willemstad, Curaçao (Amsterdam: J.H de Bussy, 1901), 38–50. Source other years: NL-HaNA, Curaçao-O, 1.05.12.01 inv.no. 1468 (1723–1730), inv.no. 1472 (1785–1791)
The marriage records of Suriname’s Dutch Reformed Church, meanwhile (Figure 5), show a different pattern: here, European-born women continued to make up a significant share of brides until well into the eighteenth century, only becoming a minority in its final quarter, a period in which simultaneously the absolute
Suriname: place of birth of grooms and brides in the marriage records of the Dutch Reformed Church, 1687–1792. Source: Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, Digitaal Duplicaat Suriname: Doop-, Trouw- en Begraafboeken (DTB), access number 1.05.11.16, inv.nos. 1 (1747–1766), 2 (1766–1801), 9 (1687–1730)
Although these data give us a first glance into the dynamism of Dutch colonial societies, they only reveal the behavior of a very small portion of their
2 Dutch Marriage Legislation
The early modern period was characterized by an increasing institutionalization of marriage, with couples facing growing pressure to go through increasingly regulated procedures to formalize their union. In Europe, this transition was closely tied to the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, which radically altered the meaning of marriage in both a theological and a legal sense. In the Catholic doctrine which dominated most of medieval Europe, marriage was a sacrament and therefore under the spiritual jurisdiction of the church. What set it apart from the other six sacraments, however, was that as a contract whose binding nature stemmed from the mutual consent of two willing partners, marriage required no priestly mediation: a simple exchange of vows – even just in the form of a promise to marry – followed by sexual intercourse was enough to irrevocably bind husband and wife together. The church had the power to declare certain marriages illicit, by prohibiting specific people from marrying and punishing transgressors, or even invalid, by setting conditions under which a marriage would be null and void (such as bigamy or an absence of freely given consent). But barring such disqualifying circumstances there was little either secular or clerical authorities could do to keep people from taking their nuptials into their own hands.34
Right around this time, in the Netherlands, laws putting restrictions on marriage started emerging, both at the local level and in sweeping top-down edicts, such as that by Charles V in 1540, which stated that brides aged twenty or younger and grooms aged twenty-five or younger had to obtain consent from their parents, family, or magistrates if they wanted to marry, or be denied their inheritance.36 Although the Edict technically remained in place after the Dutch Republic declared itself independent from the Spanish Crown, the States of Holland soon after the Revolt issued their own sweeping legislation that would be highly influential throughout the entire Dutch Republic. Regarding marriage the ‘Political Ordinance’ (Ordonnantie van de Policien) stated that henceforth everyone who wished to get married had to go through the formal channels – they could choose to turn to the local magistrate or the (Dutch Reformed) church – to have their engagement publicly announced on three consecutive Sundays. These so-called geboden or ‘banns’ were meant to ensure that anyone who knew of any objections, such as prior engagements or
Another influential document, that like the Political Ordinance would come to be used in Dutch overseas settlements, was the Echt-Reglement (‘marriage regulations’), which was enacted by the States-General in 1656 for the non-sovereign territories on the Southern edges of the Republic, the ‘Generality Lands’. These regulations were stricter and more extensive than the Political Ordinance: they set more specific demands for the registration of engagements, banned the solemnization of marriages by Catholic priests, and gave explicit instructions for the commissioners in charge of registering couples. They were to record names, ages, ‘quality’, place of residence and how long the couple had lived there, whether they were ‘free persons, free from others’, whether they had their parents’ consent (if they were underage), whether and how they were related to each other, and the details or any prior marriages. The requirements for familial consent for minors, moreover, was expanded: whereas the Political Ordinance only required the consent of any surviving parents, the Echt-Reglement specified that underage orphans would need the consent of guardians or other relatives. The Regulations also institutionalized the marriage ceremony itself, including the vows the bride and groom made to each other: the groom was to promise to ‘never leave [the bride], but stay with her for life, love her, faithfully care and provide for her, live and keep a household with her with reason, piety and honor, and be faithful to her in all things, as befits an honest man and as he owes to his housewife.’ The bride, in this formalization of gender roles in matrimony, also vowed to never leave her husband and keep an honest household with him, and to ‘obey, serve, and help him in all just and reasonable things’.38
By the time the States General published the Echt-Reglement in 1656, Dutch colonial expansion was already well underway, and indeed overseas circumstances seem to have been on the minds of States General legislators: they banned marriages of Christians to not only Jews, but also to Muslims and
Because the Dutch legal tradition that colonies were expected to abide by was highly pluriform and decentralized, however, there were many competing and complementary regulations available, issued in various parts of the Republic. Therefore, colonial authorities, both in governmental and judicial capacities, still had considerable leeway about which legal sources to apply. The governing councils of Berbice and Curaçao, for example, decided in 1736 and 1752, respectively, to henceforth apply the Echt-Reglement in the regulation of marriage, rather than just the Political Ordinance.46 Even where no such decision had been pronounced, prosecutors would make references to it along with other legal sources, such as the work of famous jurists. The decentralized structure of the Dutch Republic and Roman-Dutch law, while establishing certain basic principles, thus translated into local variation in the governance of marriage overseas. This was amplified by the fact that, just as cities issued their own local legislation in the Republic, local colonial governments could respond to specific events and conditions by publishing locally targeted ordinances, or so-called plakaten, giving rise to a new body of legislation that was ‘Dutch’ in form, but specifically colonial in content.
3
The will of parents and family on the one hand, and legislation issued by secular authorities on the other (entangled through the latter’s institutionalization of the former) were the primary modes through which the formation of marriages could be restricted or regulated in the Dutch Republic, and this was no different in Dutch overseas settlements. The way in which they did so, however, took on new meaning in the hierarchically complex, multi-ethnic and multi-religious societies ruled by Dutch colonial authorities. This applies first and foremost to inter-faith marriages, as Christians, and especially Protestants, were usually a minority in ‘Dutch’ settlements across the globe.
Because religion was a key marker of political allegiance and cultural belonging and because married couples tend to raise their children in their own religious tradition, inter-faith marriages were a battleground for the reproduction of communities. To have a member of one’s religious group marry outside the group and convert to the outsider’s religion was to lose people and therefore power. The reverse scenario, on the other hand (i.e. new converts joining the community through marriage) meant an expansion of influence, but also potentially a change in the make-up and behavior of the group. This dual concern is reflected in the quick pace at which Dutch legislators started to restrict and regulate religiously mixed marriages, often as one of the first orders of business after arrival. In the early years of the VOC, when its fledgling government was still centered on the Moluccas, Governor-General Matelief allowed his soldiers to marry local women on the condition that the brides were Christian, and a 1617 instruction for the Governor and Council asserted that former company servants who stayed in Asia as private citizens would be allowed to wed local women only with permission of the government, after said women were baptized and the couple promised to raise their children in the Christian faith.47
By 1621, shortly after the conquest of Jacatra, all inhabitants of the city were required to obtain consent from the government to marry, or face a fine and possible further prosecution. By 1641, after the plan to bring in Dutch ‘Company Daughters’ as brides had been definitively abandoned in favor of a policy that promoted marriage with converted Asian women, VOC authorities seem to have had some concerns about these unions too, and particularly about the cultural impact of these women as new members and future mothers of the ‘Dutch’ community in Asia. Governor-General Van Diemen issued a
This stipulation, which would be included in the first issue of the codification of locally issued laws known as the Statuten van Batavia, applicable across the VOC charter zone, was part of a larger effort to promote the use of Dutch among the population in Batavia.49 The so-called Commissarissen of Matrimonial Affairs (a board of two VOC servants and two burghers) were charged with issuing written certification of Dutch proficiency not only to brides, but also to enslaved Batavians who wished to wear hats – a visual marker of social and ethnic status – and to those who were about to be manumitted by Christian owners and thus join the free Christian population.50 Over time, however, it became clear that the Company’s vision of fostering a large Dutch-speaking Eurasian community in VOC settlements was impossible to enforce in practice: generations of Asian-born Christians – the majority of whom were women – proved to be culturally more influential than the European newcomers these women married, and creolized Portuguese and Malay became the languages of everyday life.51 Significantly, by the time the Statuten were re-issued in 1766, the Dutch language requirement had disappeared from the marriage prescriptions.52
In Curaçao, the very first instructions for a Governor, those for Jacob Pietersz Tolck, mandated that no Christians be allowed to marry indigenous or African women unless the latter had been baptized and incorporated into the Christian community.53 This was repeated almost verbatim a century later, in the instructions for Isaack Faesch in 1739.54 Like in many Dutch colonies that had previously been under Iberian control, it was not a given that this Christian community would be Protestant, and Catholicism was perceived as a political threat. Nowhere did local Dutch authorities issue outright bans on marriages between Protestants and Catholics, but in places where significant Catholic
In Dutch-ruled coastal Ceylon, the secular authorities actively joined the church in promoting a ‘Reformation’ of local people’s marriages. Christians living in and around Colombo were repeatedly called on to register their (pre-existing) marriage in the Dutch Reformed Church, and various pressures, from fines to labor requirements, were put on young couples to incentivize them to marry in church.55 A 1754 ordinance, moreover, mirrored the Echt-Reglement in banning Catholic priests from solemnizing marriages, and even went so far as to declare children born of these unions illegitimate and unable to inherit. Instead, Catholics’ weddings were to be performed by the worldly authorities, and for a fee. In addition to these attempts to wrest jurisdiction over marriage from the Catholic Church, some measures explicitly addressing inter-confessional marriage also appeared in the eighteenth century: a 1759 ordinance proclaimed that mixed Protestant-Catholic marriages would only be allowed under exceptional circumstances, and only if the children would be raised in the Reformed tradition. In 1788, Ceylon officially took over the regulations issued by the Dutch States-General in 1750, which had raised the minimum age for mixed-faith couples, put six weeks between proclamations, and excluded anyone who married a Catholic from political or military office.56 As Nadeera Rupesinghe has shown, however, Dutch success at ‘reforming’ Sri Lankan family formation was limited in practice, with both Catholicism and local customary marriage practices remaining influential.57
In Cochin, the VOC took a slightly different approach: it allowed denominationally mixed marriages – in fact, as the Cochin marriage records show, many weddings officiated in the Reformed Church inside the fort were between Catholics and Protestants, as well as between two Catholics – but tried to cut those of European status off from Catholic services, thus institutionally confining them to formally ‘Protestant’ marriages and baptisms. It did so by coming to an agreement with Catholic priests of the region in 1665: the priests would continue to serve the ‘naturellen’ (natives) of the region – notably in Vaipin island just across the estuary on which Cochin lay, where many Luso-Indians
It is clear, however, that in the years to come, this new view of ‘European’ belonging would lead to conflicts between the Company and the Catholic priests concerning the status of creolized inhabitants of Cochin. In 1717, the Dutch authorities in Cochin complained that the priests of Vaipin had broken the 1665 agreement by welcoming ‘a mass of castizo and mestizo women from this city’ into the Catholic Church. Although these women of combined European and Asian descent were locally born, the Cochin Council was adamant that, at least as far as expectations of religious adherence were concerned, ‘we do not count Mestizos and Castizos among the natives of the land, but directly among our nation.’59 As such, they were expected to be Protestant. Although the reason the VOC agreed to Catholic priests working with non-European populations outside the citadel was likely pragmatic – the Dutch Reformed Church simply did not have the institutional apparatus to take charge of all Christian congregations in the region, most crucially in the form of ministers who spoke Portuguese or Malayalam – the result was a codification of ethnic difference in religion, with Catholicism increasingly joining Islam and Hinduism as a marker of Asian status and Protestantism as a container for a jealously guarded ‘Dutch’ community.
A similar divide occurred in Curaçao, although for very different reasons. The island had some Catholic heritage when the Dutch arrived because it had initially been colonized by Spain, but what ultimately cemented a Catholic presence on the island was its role in the slave trade. Curaçao’s primary economic function for the WIC was as an entrepot in the transatlantic slave trade, a hub from which to re-export captured Africans to various American colonies. By and large the most lucrative export destination was the territory under the Spanish crown, which regulated its supply of enslaved labor through the much-coveted asiento. To dip into this market the WIC had to make concessions
In theory, Catholics, along with the island’s large Jewish population and other non-conformist groups, had to marry either in the Dutch Reformed Church or before the secular authorities, just like in the Dutch Republic and other colonies such as Ceylon.61 In practice, however, this rule does not seem to have been enforced: when, in 1784, the island’s fiscaal (the chief legal officer) reportedly attempted to enforce the requirement, after years of authorities turning a blind eye, and to levy the accompanying fee for courthouse nuptials, the Catholic Church sent a papal nuncio to the States General in The Hague to complain. The nuncio argued that the fees would unfairly burden poorer Catholic residents of the island, and the States General forwarded the matter to the WIC, which immediately began to make inquiries in order to assure the nuncio that ‘proper attention is paid to the Roman religion on Curaçao, and its members are not excessively burdened’.62
Mixed Catholic-Protestant marriages were permitted, with little to no explicit restrictions placed on them through local ordinances. Local church leadership, however, did attempt to regulate mixed pairings in such a way that would help preserve the Reformed congregation: the predikant (preacher) Rasvelt wrote to his superiors, the Classis of Amsterdam, that he had instituted a policy of making Catholic-Protestant couples who wished to wed in his church swear an oath, promising to baptize and raise their future children in the Calvinist faith.63 There was little he could do, however, to enforce this promise. Over the centuries, a considerable Catholic population formed, which was largely comprised of manumitted people and their children, along with Catholics of mixed descent from the Spanish-controlled mainland, while the Protestant community remained relatively small and predominantly white.64
3.1 Marriage and Race: the Case of Suriname
Legislation explicitly addressing inter-group marriage is virtually absent in the Plakaatboek of Suriname. This is somewhat surprising considering the colony’s sizeable Jewish population living alongside Christian settlers and the colony’s tense racial configuration, with a minority of whites (predominantly Northern-European Protestant and Sephardic Jewish) seeking to maintain control over a majority of enslaved Africans, and an ambiguous social position for various Amerindian groups as well as free Africans and Eurafricans. A possible explanation for this absence of formal regulation is the relative strength of indirect and informal control mechanisms, in which communal self-control, religious leadership, and state intervention converged to exclude those considered inferior from the marriage circuit of the white colonial elite.
A striking example that underscores this theory is the case of a black woman named Isabella, who in 1721 had been one of the first enslaved Africans in Suriname to be baptized and join the Dutch Reformed Church and who had reportedly even visited the Netherlands. She was manumitted after her master’s death and joined communion at the Cottica-Perica church.65 Her newly free and Christian status did not mean that she was accepted into the congregation as a full, equal, and marriageable member, however. Instead, as she would
Several factors are at play in Isabella’’s case. One is the role of the church as a communal gatekeeper, with the power to set conditions for access to the community, and by extension to marriage. Another is an informal barrier to the marriage market through highly racialized notions of honor and desirability that can be found across Atlantic slavery societies: the white congregants’ attitude towards Isabella reflects a well-documented pattern of racial stereotyping of black women as simultaneously hyper-sexualized and unattractive – even monstrous – or as sexually desirable but unfit for the role of virtuous wife.68 This designation of Isabella as ‘unmarriageable’ stands in stark contrast with the apparent ease with which, if the comments of several colonial authorities are to be believed, even notoriously unruly young white women found husbands in Suriname, whereas those same girls might have been treated with more derision in the Dutch Republic or in Atlantic colonies where there was a substantial white female underclass.69 The formal and informal factors were
This mechanism seems to have been strongest in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when white settlers almost exclusively married European women. Over the course of the eighteenth century, however, legal marriages between Europeans and daughters of white fathers and African or Eurafrican mothers became an increasingly normal occurrence, seemingly without social repercussions for the husband.71 This development was not without its discontents, both among Christians and among the white Jewish population. Aviva Ben-Ur lays out how the Mahamad, the governing council of the Sephardic Jewish community of Suriname, actively intervened in unions between white Jewish men and mulatas by invoking the racial bifurcation of membership already in place in the Surinamese Jewish community: a jahid, or full member by virtue of his European descent, would be relegated to the category of congregante reserved for lower-ranking members of Eurafrican descent, and even be considered ‘mulatto’ himself, if he married a Eurafrican woman.72
For some, however, this relegation to lower status did not go far enough. In 1722, a white member of the Jewish community named Juda Abrahams petitioned with Suriname’s colonial government, asking them to intervene in the impending nuptials of his cousin, Philip Joseph, a minor whose legal
The Jewish by-law explicitly mentioned mulatas, or women of ‘mixed’ African and European descent, which Ben-Ur interprets to mean that formal marriage between a white man and black African woman was considered so unspeakable by both the Mahamad and the white community that it did not merit being formally addressed. The same applies to formal unions between black men and white women: although informal sexual relationships (‘fornication’) between European women and African men were strictly prohibited under penalty of death in government-issued ordinances in both Suriname and neighboring Guyana, formalizations of these unions in the form of marriage are not mentioned in legislation at all, suggesting that social ostracism – whether in institutionalized form by the Consistory or Mahamad or through public scandal – was so strong that it rendered these marriages virtually impossible and legislation unnecessary.74 Only where there was friction between publicly held norms, daily practice, and authorities’ expectations do inter-racial relationships pop up in the archive. In this light, the very fact that the Mahamad found it necessary to regulate marriages between European men and Eurafrican women shows that these unions were becoming socially acceptable enough to be of concern.
As inter-racial relationships became more frequent, so did institutional responses to them – not just from the church and synagogue, but also from the colony in its capacity as employer. Military officers and plantation directors employed by the colony were arguably less free in their partner choice than private planters, because they could be directly penalized for marrying a
[…] this black Elisabeth Samson is already very rich, and stands to get even richer through her sisters and other family, and [these] goods may in time come to be under the whites because of this marriage, which would not be wrong; for to have overly powerful free people here among
the negroes is a thing to be feared, because it gives our slaves the idea that they can rise to our level.76
It is certain that it’s more through a sense the negroes have of our pre-eminence over them, that we are people of a better and more noble nature than they, that we must maintain ourselves amidst such a strange twisted race, rather than through any real power we have; and what will they believe of that excellent nature once they see that they just have to be free to form a formal union with us, so that their children are on par with ours, would that lapse of whites who humiliate themselves so not be noted?77
The case of Samson demonstrates the discretionary power of the colonial authorities within an ambiguous legal landscape to significantly obstruct legal marriages which they considered a threat to the colonial hierarchy. At the same time, however, it highlights the ability of those of generous means to challenge this hierarchy through social mobility and an active leveraging of the law. Women like Samson do not easily fit into binary narratives about colonial power. As a black woman, she had experienced legal discrimination and social exclusion on multiple occasions throughout her life, and her marriage to a white man may have been a strategy to shield herself from this. As a wealthy slave owner with a considerable stake in Suriname’s plantation industry,
3.2 Race across the Dutch Empire
The Suriname case shows how the triple force of government intervention, exclusion through religious membership, and informal social control intertwined to govern inter-group marriage in such a way as to sharpen the boundaries between the white elite on the one hand and the free and enslaved black population on the other, while incorporating individuals of African descent in the former group to a limited degree. Suriname was not unique in this, although the precise ways in which these factors of control functioned in specific settings across the Dutch empire highlight the strongly context-dependent nature of social difference as it was negotiated through marriage.
In Curaçao, like in Suriname and Guyana, no law explicitly banning inter-racial marriage ever materialized. However, as Han Jordaan has shown, white Curaçao elites were most definitely concerned with maintaining the ‘whiteness’ of their families by preventing marriages with people of color.80 In the 1750s a group of white islanders lobbied with both the island’s council and the States General in the Netherlands to restrict inter-racial marriage by declaring all marriages between a non-white person and a white person without the latter’s family’s consent to be null and void.81 After deliberation between the States General, the WIC, and the island council, such a move was deemed too politically risky, because it would affront the significant number of prominent island families whose members were not entirely white. Instead, it was decided that the Echt-Reglement of the Generality lands would henceforth be applied on the island, which increased the reach of relatives in consenting to or preventing the marriages of young family members (younger than twenty for brides and twenty-five for grooms) without specifying race.82
whites are not ashamed to wed women de couleur, and because of the familiarity that takes place with the rest of the family of such a woman, they no longer display the subservience for whites that they ought to have. On this island there are no more than seven families that one can count as purely white, which is the reason why those people of color enjoy much protection.84
Like in Suriname, the reality of mixed marriage and inter-racial sociability that had become part of daily life on Curaçao clashed with the political concerns of white elites, who saw in the upwards social mobility of formerly enslaved people and their descendants a potential threat to the social order. Where exactly this threat lay, however, differed between Curaçao and the Guyanese mainland. In Curaçao, Catholicism as a marker of otherness and potential
This becomes clear from the regulations for manumission issued in 1733, which stipulated that manumitted people were free to marry both each other and others, with the exception of people still enslaved.86 Those who ‘mixed’ with enslaved men or women and had children with them could even be re-enslaved, as was the case with Isabella who was re-enslaved exactly around this time – if not slightly before the manumission rules were published, suggesting her case informed the contents of the new law.87 A 1761 expansion of the law discouraged socializing between free and enslaved people more broadly, warning manumitted people that if they were caught participating in balliaren (dancing by enslaved people that the colonial authorities designated as a form of ‘uproar’) they would be forced to watch the execution of the enslaved man or woman they danced with (suggesting the legislators were specifically concerned with interpersonal relationships between free and enslaved people). If they were caught a second time, they would be re-enslaved.88 The new law also specified that manumitted people ‘while enjoying equal rights to those born free in other respects’ were expected to behave in a subservient and deferential manner when it came to interacting with whites. Free people of color in the Dutch Guianas were thus expected to live in a state of ‘subservient inclusion’, with some – especially those who were well-connected, female,
The situation was entirely different on the West-African Gold Coast, where any notion of a self-reproducing ‘white’ community was absent, and thus the policing of such a community through marriage restrictions was largely irrelevant. This did not mean that concerns about inter-communal parings were not raised, especially where the church was concerned: as will become clear in chapter four, generations of Elmina-based pastors would lament over the pervasive pattern of non-marital sex between Europeans stationed on the West-African coast and local women. Marriage, too, however, could become an object of concern in this setting. Just how different the role of race in and around Elmina was from the Caribbean context becomes clear from the case of Jacobus Elisa Johannes Capitein (1717–1747), the famous black Reformed pastor who was born in West-Africa, captured and enslaved as a child, and who ended up studying Theology in Leiden before returning to his native continent as a predikant in service of the WIC (Figure 6).
Portrait of Jacobus Capitein (1717–1747) as printed on his dissertation: J.E.J. Capitein, Staatkundig-godgeleerd onderzoekschrift over de slaverny, als niet strydig tegen de christelyke vryheid (Leiden: Philippus Bonk, 1742. Engraving by Pieter Tanjé [1742]). Source: Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, object number RP-P-1903-A-23405 (https://id.rijksmuseum.nl/20020405) (cropped)
Capitein was an adamant proponent of marriage as an alternative to the local, non-Christian institution of calicharen which he considered a form of concubinage, and in order to set a good example for his flock, set out to marry a local Elminan girl. The idea of a Reformed pastor marrying a ‘Heathen’ woman, even if Capitein arranged for her to convert to Christianity, however, outraged his superiors in Amsterdam, and arrangements were made for Capitein to marry a European Christian woman, The Hague-born Anthonia Ginderdros.90 This scenario, of a black man being encouraged to marry a (presumably) white woman rather than an African woman of non-Christian origin, would have been unthinkable in the Caribbean, but because of the particular status of Capitein as well as the specific social context of Elmina, religious affiliation took precedence over color here: Capitein, as far as his employers were concerned, was a representative of the Dutch Reformed Church before anything else, and his marriage was to reflect that affiliation.
In case any young people, not yet of age and having parents in Europe, request to get married, distinction will be made as to whether these reside within the United Netherlands and are honorable people or not; for if they are living elsewhere and are lowly people, the commissioners will approve the request without making it too grave a matter, unless there is any notable reason to the contrary.
But if [the parents] live in the Fatherland and are people of honor, attention will be paid to how he who requests the banns departed from them and what party he wants to wed; because if they came here against their parents’ wishes or want to marry an unequal party, a black, dishonorable or other lowly person, such will not be permitted by the commissioners for weighty reasons.92
Deborah Hamer has shown how the VOC’s marriage policy aimed to exclude lower-class and ‘foreign’ Europeans – particularly soldiers who disproportionately hailed from outside the Dutch Republic and were of impoverished background – from the upper echelons of VOC society, while simultaneously fostering a loyal labor force that was bound to the Indies.94 Key in this policy were decisions in the 1630s and ‘40s by the High Government in Batavia and the ‘Lords XVII’, the VOC’s board of directors in the Netherlands, to prohibit Europeans married to Asian women to repatriate while their wives were alive and a 1649 law that forbade all inlandsche (native-born) women and their husbands from leaving VOC-controlled territory. This was, in part, motivated by a desire to bind company-affiliated families to the charter zone, as becomes clear from the Company’s policy on European female migration around this time: while women’s access to the East Indies was increasingly restricted in the mid-1600s, the women that did obtain permission to travel east (generally those marrying into the company’s higher echelons) were required to stay there – initially for fifteen years, and as of 1669 for five years after their marriage.95
Another factor, however, seems to have been the wish to keep people of Asian descent out of the Netherlands, as the ban on native-born wives’
The result was a trans-continental racialization of class difference: on one side of the socio-economic spectrum, a mobile company elite formed that in part distinguished itself through its exclusive access to European wives and was able (although with some restrictions) to travel back and forth between Europe and Asia. This mobility was key, because it allowed for ‘Europeanness’ to be defined through other means than through birth: company elites, as a rule, sent their Asian-born sons to Europe at a young age for their education (a privilege that was denied to the rank-and-file), and it was this European enculturation, along with the key connections in the Dutch Republic that could be gained, that enabled those who returned to Asia to enjoy the status of a Dutchman and the prospects within the Company that this offered. If they married, their (frequently) locally born-and-raised wives similarly took on ‘European’ status, despite never having set foot on the continent, their Dutch Christian names belying, as European male travelers were often shocked to find out, a strongly creolized, locally oriented enculturation.98 On the other side of the spectrum, the VOC promoted the formation of a multi-ethnic lower and middle class of soldiers, sailors, burghers, and administrative personnel tied to Asia through either their birth or their marriage. As chapter four will show, however, this policy was only partly effective, as the company’s policies rendered marriage so unattractive that many European men opted for alternatives to marriage that did not tie them to the Indies, as
3.3 Enslaved Marriage
As slavery was officially foreign to the Dutch Republic, Dutch overseas settlements relied on Roman law to regulate the institution, and in this legal context slaves were not legal persons with rights. As a result, enslaved marriages had no juridical validity, but this does not mean that they were entirely impossible or of no consequence. Across the Dutch empire, enslaved men and women formed unions – both with each other and with free people – that were met with varying levels of formal recognition, frequently prompting government intervention through legislation. In addition to labor and race relations, religion is – again – key in accounting for differences between different colonies, because even if enslaved marriage was not legally recognized, it could still enjoy a certain level of social recognition by being formalized in church and thus gaining spiritual legitimacy.
In Curaçao, the possibility of enslaved people marrying either each other or a free person was considered early on: in the 1638 instructions for Governor Tolck, along with the demand that black women who wanted to marry a Christian needed to be baptized and educated in the Christian faith, the WIC directors also decreed that the control of enslaved marriages would be in the hands of the island’s clerical authorities: no enslaved Africans would be allowed to get married without permission from the consistory, even if they had been baptized. This scenario seems to have remained mostly theoretical for the Dutch Reformed Church, however, for its marriage registers contain no trace of unions involving enslaved people. This is unsurprising considering the Reformed Church on the island, as a rule, did not admit enslaved people to its ranks. As minister Rasvelt wrote in 1742 in response to being admonished by the Classis of Amsterdam for failing to convert ‘blacks and mulattoes’ as the Catholic priest was doing at a rapid pace: ‘which minister among my predecessors, from 1673 to 1730 has ever made a mulatto or negro a member of the church while still a slave?’. He blamed the problem on white slaveholders, most of whom refused to allow their slaves to convert, and went on to downplay the priest’s achievement, questioning whether his converts could really be called Christians, ‘who know nothing of the faith
Meanwhile, Jewish slaveholders in Curaçao did sometimes allow their slaves to be baptized: unlike in Suriname, where enslaved people could become Jewish, in Curaçao these baptisms were generally Catholic.101 Enslaved marriages in practice therefore largely fell under the jurisdiction of the Catholic Church. By the late eighteenth century, the colonial government started expanding its control over these matrimonies. As of 1753, with the application of the Echt-Reglement in Curaçao, Catholic priests were not authorized to register banns or marry people, but in practice they continued to do so, which resulted in the 1784–1785 conflict with the Catholic Church, finally leading to fiscaal (prosecutor) Van Teijlingen prohibiting the local priests Brouwer and Schenk from marrying free or enslaved non-white islanders without written permission from the Council’s secretary.102 The Vatican responded by granting an exception to the Council of Trent’s ruling that marriages must be officiated by a priest to be valid: marriages conducted in pre-tridentine fashion (i.e an exchange of vows between the couple in front of witnesses) by enslaved Curaçaoans were valid in the eyes of the Church, if not those of the colonial government.103
In Suriname and Guyana, the Catholic Church as a vehicle to marriage for enslaved people was largely absent.104 Berbice especially had limited options, because it also excluded Jews, who were the religious group most likely to convert their slaves in Suriname.105 In the 1730s the participation of non-whites
That same year, the Governor and Council of Berbice issued a plakaat ordering free Amerindian men who had taken an enslaved Amerindian woman as their wife to stay on the plantation in the service of the woman’s master.107 The ordinance was published on the heels of a legal conflict between two planters two years earlier, involving the free Amerindian Ivericariquammo, also known as Ante. The latter had worked on the plantation Westzouburg, where he had formed a relationship with an enslaved African woman named Drivke. He had also had sex with an enslaved Amerindian woman on the plantation De Vrijheid, however, and this woman’s master, Robertus van Weningen, demanded he come live and work on De Vrijheid. Van Weningen claimed to have a right to keep Ante on the ground that it was possible he had impregnated the enslaved Amerindian woman, which he considered a liability. Ante, when questioned by the court, said he considered neither enslaved woman to be his wife – he already had a wife ‘at the Indian lodge’ – but he was amenable to living at De Vrijheid. A Mr. Chaille, however (likely the Director of Westzouburg), objected to this and demanded that he stay at Westzouburg. The court, judging Ante to be someone who ‘goes with anyone’, decreed that he was to be ordered to live at the fort in service of the colony instead.108
The 1738 ordinance should therefore not be seen as a regulation of Christian marriages between free and enslaved people, but rather as an attempt at imposing Christian norms of monogamy on free and enslaved workers to prevent conflicts over labor. It enabled planters to tie down ‘husbands’ as a means of tying their labor to the plantation, regardless of whether the
In the East Indies, the marriages of enslaved people also became a topic of legal regulation. From the beginning, it was understood that VOC servants could only marry enslaved women after the latter had been manumitted, but beyond the company ranks the rules were not so clearly defined, at least not initially. A 1661 plakaat regulating living quarters for enslaved men married to free women states that at least 231 such women (many of whom had likely been initially enslaved as well) lived in Batavia. Four years later, free women were banned from marrying an enslaved man, unless the couple already had children. In 1696, the city’s Aldermen (Schepenen) issued a more elaborate ruling on enslaved marriage: no slave was allowed to marry a free person, nor were enslaved servants of different masters permitted to wed, and those who could marry had to obtain permission from their master to establish a separate household together, and they would only be allowed to earn the minimum amount of ‘coolie wages’ (i.e. working as a day laborer) outside their master’s service as they would need to support their family.111
This arrangement could, in practice, also involve slaves and their manumitted partners. In 1765 Batavia, for example, the Buginese woman Inting or ‘Ma Duijt’ and the enslaved bricklayer Elau or Saul had initially been enslaved in the same household, but continued their relationship after Inting was
A notable difference between the Caribbean and Indian ocean context, and between the seventeenth and the eighteenth century, lay in the possibility of enslaved marriages in the Dutch Reformed Church. In the overwhelmingly white congregations of the eighteenth-century Dutch Caribbean such formal unions were almost unthinkable, but this had not always, or everywhere, been the case. As historians of Dutch Brazil and New Netherland have shown, it had initially been fairly common for enslaved people to marry in the Reformed church in seventeenth-century Dutch Atlantic settlements (and thus the early overseas Reformed practice did not differ significantly from Catholic practices in Spanish America and Portuguese Brazil).113 In the East Indies, moreover, the Dutch Reformed Church also seems to have been relatively open to enslaved congregants and by extension enslaved marriages, although they did become increasingly rare as time progressed.114 In 1673, 10 of the 150 marriages listed in the marriage registers in Batavia were between people who were enslaved at the time, usually belonging to the same master. By 1756 it was down to two couples among a total of 98 and by 1786 there were none whose enslaved status is mentioned. Christian unions between enslaved people happened at the pleasure of masters, and for a while, it seems to have been a fashionable thing to promote as a display of piety among the upper echelons of VOC society,
4 Conclusion
Marriage, in the Dutch early modern empire, constituted not just a contract between husband and wife and their respective communities, but also a mutual agreement between the spouses and the secular or religious authorities: in return for official sanction of their union, the status that may come with this, and the solidification of property rights for spouses and their children, people who married agreed to be recorded within the bureaucratic apparatus of the governing institution and, more importantly, to abide by any legal obligations their marriage may entail. Matrimony was thus a key institution through which an ordered and structured community could proliferate and pass on its wealth and through which authorities could maintain order in colonial society.
Because corporate-colonial governance and the Dutch Reformed Church were closely intertwined in the early modern Dutch empire, it is not surprising that it was Christians, and particularly Protestants, over whom colonial authorities exercised the greatest control through marriage. A Christian community of legally married families, loyal to the Dutch Republic and its chartered companies, and able to control both land and enslaved workers, then, formed a central part of Dutch authorities’ idealized vision for colonial expansion and development.
This imperial vision, however, stood in constant tension with the situation on the ground, as migrations, conversions, mixed marriages, and the social mobility of former outsiders challenged who exactly formed the ‘in-group’ that colonial authorities relied on and served to protect. Just how indeterminate this mirage of a loyal and stable demographic foundation of power was, becomes clear from the varied and shifting terms applied to designate it: Reformed, Christian, Dutch, European, White, or even just ‘respectable’. Each
Marriage regulations served to create order in this situation, and to some extent they were successful: in each of the company’s colonial settlements (not including the Gold Coast in this designation) hierarchies formed with Christian, slave-owning elites at the top who used marriage to exchange and pass down property and status in a way that was more or less controlled by the colonial authorities. At the same time, however, the influence of local agency was such that these elites were far from completely white, let alone Dutch or of the Reformed faith, and sometimes not even completely Christian. Before turning to the regulation of marriage among this latter, non-Christian group, the following chapter will explore another crack in the phantom vision of orderly, married colonial life: what happened when married life fell apart, spousal conflict arose, and legally married Christians sought divorce?
I use ‘Christian’ instead of ‘Protestant’ or ‘Dutch-Reformed’ here because, while denominational differences mattered, and the relationship of Catholicism to Dutch colonial power was particularly complex and varied across the empire, Catholics and non-Calvinist Protestants were drawn into the Dutch legal sphere regulating marriage in a way that other groups were not. The legal pluralism that left Chinese, Muslim, and Jewish groups with varying degrees of communal autonomy (see chapter 3) was not, or only marginally, extended to Catholics. On the VOC’s varying attitude towards Catholicism, see Markus P. M. Vink, “Church and State in Seventeenth-Century Colonial Asia: Dutch-Parava Relations in Southeast India in a Comparative Perspective,” Journal of Early Modern History 4, no. 1 (January 1, 2000): 1–43.
NL-HaNa, VOC, 1.04.02, inv.no. 1, ‘Octrooi verleend door de Staten-Generaal betreffende de alleenhandel ten oosten van Kaap de Goede Hoop en ten westen van de Straat van Magallanes voor de duur van 21 jaar’, 1602, scan 8–9.
C. R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600–1800 (London: Hutchinson, 1977), 215–20; Van Wamelen, Family life, 177–80; Jean Gelman Taylor, The Social World of Batavia; Europeans and Eurasians in Colonial Indonesia, 2nd rev. ed. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 16.
Leonard Blussé, “The Caryatids of Batavia: Reproduction, Religion and Acculturation under the V.O.C.,” Itinerario 7, no. 1 (1983): 62–63.
For more on the debates regarding free trade by Burghers, see Arthur Weststeijn, “The VOC as a Company-State: Debating Seventeenth-Century Dutch Colonial Expansion,” Itinerario 38, no. 1 (April 2014): 13–34; H. E. Niemeijer, “Calvinisme en koloniale stadscultuur, Batavia 1619–1725” (PhD Dissertation, Amsterdam, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 1996), 28–31.
Van Wamelen, Family life, 175; Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 216.
Bethencourt, Racisms, 199; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500–1700: A Political and Economic History (London: Longman, 1993), 97.
H. T. (Herman Theodoor) Colenbrander, ed., Jan Pietersz. Coen, bescheiden omtrent zijn bedrijf in Indië, vol. 1 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1919), 605, 709–11, 795–96.
Colenbrander, Coen 1:795.
Colenbrander, Coen 1, 732.
Leonard Blusse, “Batavia, 1619–1740: The Rise and Fall of a Chinese Colonial Town,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 12, no. 1 (March 1981): 170–171.
Taylor, The Social World of Batavia, 58, 118. Only once did the VOC have a Governor-General who had neither been born nor raised in Europe: Ceylon-born P.A. van der Parra, who was in office from 1761 to 1775. Although frequently described as Eurasian, Van der Parra was in fact of fully Dutch descent, having been born to a Dutch mother and a father who hailed from the Dutch, company-employed administrative elite that had established itself on Ceylon since the early years following the VOC’s takeover of the island. It is likely that Van der Parra was able to draw on both his ethnic status and his family connections in the VOC world in order to cement his unique position. Although several other company servants who spent their formative years in Asia were able to climb to the highest echelons of VOC power (Notably Rijcklof Van Goens and Joan van Hoorn), they were exceptions to the rule, and often had family that tied them to either the Dutch Republic’s olichargic elite or to powerful company servants, or both.
Ulbe Bosma and Remco Raben, Being “Dutch” in the Indies: A History of Creolisation and Empire, 1500–1920, Research in International Studies. Southeast Asia Series; No. 116 (Singapore: Athens, OH: NUS Press; Ohio University Press, 2008), 14–25. See also H. E. Niemeijer, Batavia: een koloniale samenleving in de zeventiende eeuw, Digital edition (Amsterdam: Balans, 2005); Jean Gelman Taylor, The Social World of Batavia; Europeans and Eurasians in Colonial Indonesia, 2nd rev. ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009).
Examples include Rensselaerswijck in New Netherland, Berbice under the Van Peere Family, and various failed colonization attempts on the Wild Coast. Jaap Jacobs, “Dutch Proprietary Manors In America: The Patroonships In New Netherland,” in Constructing Early Modern Empires, ed. Louis Roper and Bertrand van Ruymbeke (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 301–26; Henk den Heijer, “‘Over Warme En Koude Landen’: Mislukte Nederlandse Volksplantingen Op de Wilde Kust in de Zeventiende Eeuw,” De Zeventiende Eeuw 21 (2005): 79–90; Geert Stroo, “Zeeuwen op de Wilde Kust, Berbice,” Den Spiegel 37, no. 3 (2019): 8–15.
Susanah Shaw Romney, “‘With & alongside His Housewife’: Claiming Ground in New Netherland and the Early Modern Dutch Empire,” The William and Mary Quarterly 73, no. 2 (2016): 191.
Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 227–28; Deborah Hamer, “Creating an Orderly Society: The Regulation of Marriage and Sex in the Dutch Atlantic World, 1621–1674” (Columbia University, 2014), 67.
NL-HaNA, SvS, 1.05.03 inv.no. 52, 15 December 1762, scan 255–256. Conversely, around the same time, plans were being made to send boys from Suriname to the same orphanage in Amsterdam so they could be raised and educated there. NL-HaNA, SvS, 1.05.03 inv.no. 154, 8 February 1762, scan 17.
NL-HaNA, SvS, 1.05.03 inv.no. 319, 13 July 1763, scan 253.
NL-HaNA, SvS, 1.05.03 inv.no. 321, December 1763, scan 69–73. See also Karwan Fatah-Black, “A Swiss Village in the Dutch Tropics: The Limitations of Empire-Centred Approaches to the Early Modern Atlantic World,” BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review 128, no. 1 (March 19, 2013): 31–52.
NL-HaNA, SvS, 1.05.03 inv.no. 52, scan 75.
NL-HaNA, WIC, 1.05.01.02, inv.no. 7, Plan to found a colony under Castle Hollandia on the coast of Africa, October 1727, folio 129.
‘Wat de land Negers aanbelangt, die kreunen zig in’t minste niet aan de Europeanen dan voor soo verre het met haar Interest overeen komt, en Uw Ed. Groot Agtb. kunnen wel verzeekert sijn, dat die nooit ofte ooit sullen toelaten, dat de Europeanen diep in het Land komen indringen; wil men nu sulx met geweld ondernemen, sulx is ten eenemaal onmogelijk want bij aldien daartoe manschap wierde uijtgesonden, wat protexie kan men hier aan dezelve verleenen? Seer weinig; terwijl het gezag der Europeanen hier te lande niet verder gaat, dan de kogel van een Canon draagt, dienvolge zoude men zoodanige menschen als slagtoffers in handen van een partheije wreede Barbaren overgeven!’ NL-HaNA, WIC, 1.05.01.02, inv.no. 108, Missive from Director-General Robert Norré, 14 April 1728, scan 15.
We might even suggest, with Pernille Ipsen, that eighteenth-century European (slave) trading posts such as the WIC’s did not constitute colonial societies at all. Pernille Ipsen, Daughters of the Trade: Atlantic Slavers and Interracial Marriage on the Gold Coast (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 8.
See, for example, Lorenzo Veracini, “Introducing: Settler Colonial Studies,” Settler Colonial Studies 1, no. 1 (January 2011): 1–3.
Mark Meuwese, Brothers in Arms, Partners in Trade Dutch-Indigenous Alliances in the Atlantic World, 1595–1674, The Atlantinc World 23 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 228–285; Susanah Shaw Romney, New Netherland Connections: Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in Seventeenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2014), 126–41; Robert Ross, “The ‘White’ Population of South Africa in the Eighteenth Century,” Population Studies 29, no. 2 (1975): 217–30; Gerald Groenewald, “Slaves and Free Blacks in VOC Cape Town, 1652–1795,” History Compass 8, no. 9 (September 1, 2010): 964–83; Rafael Thiebaut, “Indigenous Populations and Labor in the Dutch Colonial Empire – the Example of the Cape and the Guianas,” in Diversity and Empires: Negotiating Plurality in European Imperial Projects from Early Modernity, ed. Elisabeth Heijmans and Sophie Rose (London/New York: Routledge, 2023), 113–32.
The demographically and economically strong position of the Chinese diaspora in South East Asia has even prompted some scholars to characterize it as a ‘parallel’ mode of colonization co-existing with European expansion. Leonard Blussé, for example, characterized Batavia as essentially a ‘Chinese colonial town under Dutch protection.’ Blussé, Strange Company, 74. By contrast, Asians and Africans who were forcibly displaced through colonial slavery were in many places subject to more direct domination than Indigenous populations.
This distinction was first coined in the late nineteenth century by planter-turned-activist G.A. Andriesse to disparage the extractive practices of upper-class ‘sojourners’. Bosma and Raben, Being “Dutch” in the Indies, 302; A comparable bifurcation has been used by Anthony Reid for the Chinese diaspora throughout the early modern to modern period: Anthony Reid, Sojourners and Settlers: Histories of Southeast Asia and the Chinese (University of Hawaii Press, 2001).
Niemeijer, “Calvinisme en koloniale stadscultuur”; Taylor, The Social World of Batavia; Van Wamelen, Family life; Blussé, “The Caryatids of Batavia”; Michel Ketelaars, Compagniesdochters: vrouwen en de VOC (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Balans, 2014).
Taylor, The Social World of Batavia, 71; Blussé, “The Caryatids of Batavia.”
Singh, Fort Cochin in Kerala, 35, 94.
H. R. Jordaan, “Slavernij en vrijheid op Curaçao: de dynamiek van een achttiende-eeuws Atlantisch handelsknooppunt” (PhD Dissertation, Leiden University, 2012), 172.
It should be noted that the Dutch Reformed congregation represented only a limited portion of the free white population in Suriname: in addition to the substantial Jewish populations of Paramaribo and Jodensavanne, Suriname was also home (from the eighteenth century onwards) to a growing Lutheran congregation as well as several other Christian minorities.
R. A. J. van Lier, Frontier Society: A Social Analysis of the History of Surinam, trans. Maria J. L. Yperen (Dordrecht: Springer, 1971), 42–43.
John Witte, From Sacrament to Contract: Marriage, Religion, and Law in the Western Tradition, First edition (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997); Manon van der Heijden, Huwelijk in Holland: stedelijke rechtspraak en kerkelijke tucht, 1550–1700 (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1998), 30–37.
Rolf Hage, Eer tegen eer: een cultuurhistorische studie van schaking tijdens de Republiek, 1580–1795 (Hilversum: Verloren, 2019), 60–63.
“Eeuwich Edict van Keyser Karel in date den 4 october 1540,” in Groot placaet-boeck, vervattende de placaten, ordonnantien ende edicten van de Staten Generael der Vereenighde Nederlanden, ende van de Staten van Hollandt en West-Vrieslandt, mitsgaders van de Staten van Zeelandt, vol. Vol 1 (The Hague, 1658).
“Ordonnantie van de Policien binnen Holland, in date den eersen Aprilis 1580,” in Groot placaet-boeck, vervattende de placaten, ordonnantien ende edicten van de Staten Generael der Vereenighde Nederlanden, ende van de Staten van Hollandt en West-Vrieslandt, mitsgaders van de Staten van Zeelandt, vol. Vol 1 (The Hague, 1658), 329–42. II–III.
Cornelis Cau, ed., “Echt-Reglement, Over de Steden, ende ten platten Lande inde Heerlijckheden, ende Dorpen, staende onder de Generaliteyt. In Date den 18 Martij 1656,” in Groot placaet-boeck, vervattende de placaten, ordonnantien ende edicten van de Staten Generael der Vereenighde Nederlanden, ende van de Staten van Hollandt en West-Vrieslandt, mitsgaders van de Staten van Zeelandt, vol. 2 (The Hague, 1664), 2429–48.
Van Wamelen, Family life, 222; Haks, Huwelijk en gezin, 115; Van der Heijden, Huwelijk in Holland, 201–2.
Van Wamelen, Family life, 223.
Ibid., 223.
Cau, “Echt-Reglement,” sec. L.
Nadeera Rupesinghe, “Navigating Pluralities Reluctantly: The Marriage Contract in Dutch Galle,” Itinerario 42, no. 2 (August 2018): 225.
“Ordre van Regieringe soo in Policie als Justitie, inde Plaetsen verovert ende te veroveren in West-Indien, IN date den 13 October 1629”, art. LIX, in Cau, ed., Groot placcaet-boeck vol 2, 1245.
J. A. van der Chijs, Nederlandsch-Indisch plakaatboek, 1602–1811 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1885), vol. I, p. 126.
NL-HaNA, SvB, 1.05.05, inv.no. 13, scan 500; Jordaan, “Slavernij en vrijheid op Curaçao,” 2012, 174.
NIP vol I, ‘Instructie voor den Gouverneur en de Raden van Indië,’ 22–08–1617, 46–47.
NIP vol I, ‘Verbod tegen het trouwen en doopen zonder consent’, 15–01–1612, 89; “Middelen tot het bevorderen van de kennis en het gebruik der Nederduitsche Taal,” 8/11 June 1641. 459–460.
Statuten van Batavia 1642, in NIP vol I p 542.
NIP vol I, 460.
Taylor, The Social World of Batavia, 18; in Cochin, Malayam, rather than Malay, formed the main component of the creolized linguistic world along with Portuguese Singh, Fort Cochin in Kerala, 117.
NIP vol IX, 88.
‘Instructie voor Jacob Pietersz Tolck, Directeur van Curaçao,’ 1638, in WIP-C-I,6.
‘Instructie voor Isaack Faesch, aangesteld tot Directeur over de Eylanden van Curaçao”, 1739, in WIP-C vol I 187–201.
CP #15 (08–01–1647), #187 (13–06–1692), #473 (10–12–1762), #502 (11–02–1768), #684 (19–05–1795).
CP vol. II #400 (07–09–1754), 574; #473 (10–12–1762), 710; #442 (30–07–1759), 645; #624 (18–02–1788), 892–894.
Nadeera Rupesinghe, ‘Navigating Pluralities Reluctantly: The Marriage Contract in Dutch Galle,” Itinerario 42, no. 2 (August 2018): 220–37.
NL-HaNA VOC 1.04.02 inv.no. 3668 (1785), Form for Roman Catholic Priests of 12 June 1665, folio 392.
NL-HaNA VOC inv.no. 8999, “Twee extract Cochimse resoluties wegens de stoutheijt der pausgesinde,” April 25, 1717, folio 205–208. There racial classifications – taken over from Portuguese – can also be found in the Dutch Caribbean. A Mestizo was generally understood as someone with one European parent and one ‘indigenous’ parent, whereas a Castizo was understood as the offspring of a European and a Mestizo.
Linda M. Rupert, Creolization and Contraband: Curaçao in the Early Modern Atlantic World (University of Georgia Press, 2012) 87–89.
WIP-C-I, #176 (10–12–1743), 234–235; WIP-C-II, #364 (19004–1785), 435.
NL-HaNA, WIC, 1.05.01.02, inv.no. 439, Amsterdam Chamber resolutions, 30 November 1784, folio 245; inv.no. 440, 16 August 1785, folio 230–231.
Gemeente Archief Amsterdam – Archief van de Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk; Classis Amsterdam, access number 379, inv.no. 224, folio 37–38. The island of Curaçao, as this example shows, was strongly institutionally tied to the city of Amsterdam, with both the Protestant and the Jewish leadership reporting to their respective councils in Amsterdam.
Jordaan, “Slavernij en vrijheid op Curaçao,” 2012, 8, 231.
Her registration can be found in NL-HaNa, DTB Suriname, 1.05.11.16, inv.no. 9, folio 531, scan 173.
Jan Willem Kals, Neerlands Hooft- en Wortelsonde, Het verzuym van de Bekeringe der Heydenen (Leeuwarden: Pieter Koumans, 1756), 84; On the reliability of Kals’ account, see Martijn Stoutjesdijk, “Een zwarte stem in een witte tekst: De totslaafgemaakte christen Isabella in het werk van Jan Willem Kals,” Kerk en Theologie 74, no. 1 (January 1, 2023): 38–56.
Karwan Fatah-Black, Eigendomsstrijd: De geschiedenis van slavernij en emancipatie in Suriname (Amsterdam: Ambo|Anthos, 2018), 60, 145–146.
Morgan, “Male Travelers, Female Bodies”; Beckles, “Perfect Property”; Henrice Altink, “Deviant and Dangerous: Pro-Slavery Representations of Jamaican Slave Women’s Sexuality, c. 1780–1834,” Slavery & Abolition 26, no. 2 (August 1, 2005): 271–88; Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs.
Governor Crommelin, in 1763 when the plan to send Dutch orphan girls to Suriname was under discussion, cited the example of a girl who had misbehaved to such an extent she had been placed under his supervision, but who in a matter of weeks was being courted by “a respectable craftsman”. NL-HaNA, SvS, 1.05.03 inv.no. 321, scan 12–13. For a comparison to other Atlantic colonies, see Hilde Neus, “Ras of ratio?: verbod op het huwelijk tussen zwarte mannen en blanke vrouwen,” OSO 26 (2007), 312–14; Hilary Beckles, “Sex and Gender in the Historiography of Caribbean Slavery,” in Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective (Kingston: Ian Randle, 1995), 133; Brown, Good Wives, 88, 197.
On the ideological connections between race and (Protestant) Christianity as modes of exclusion, see Gerbner, Christian Slavery, 11, 74–75.
Rudie van van Lier, Samenleving in een grensgebied: een sociaal-historische studie van de maatschappij in Suriname, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1949), 74; Cynthia McLeod, Elisabeth Samson: een vrije, zwarte vrouw in het achttiende-eeuwse Suriname (Schoorl: Conserve, 1997), 46.
Aviva Ben-Ur, “A Matriarchal Matter: Slavery, Conversion, and Upward Mobility in Colonial Suriname,” in Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800, ed. Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 154–5.
NL-HaNA, SvS, 1.05.03 inv.no. 131, 29 January 1722, scan 209–211. This was not the first such intervention; a year prior, a married Jewish woman named Mariana Abrahams had intervened in her underage brother’s intended nuptials on the same grounds. Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, Digitaal Duplicaat: Oud Archief Suriname: Raad van Politie, access number 1.05.10.02, inventory number 9, 19 April 1721, folio 27–28.
The criminalization of interracial relationships outside of marriage will be discussed in chapter four.
NL-HaNA, SvB, 1.05.05, inv.no. 149, Letter 2 February 1772, folio 128; inv.no. 194, Letter 28 January 1770, scan 198. Eiffel, who complained about his pending dismissal to the Directors, seems not to have been aware of the reason behind his fall from grace. Ibid., inv.no. 147, Letter 14 May 1770, #87, scan 232.
‘… dat dese swarte Elisabeth Samson al zeer rijk is en door’t geen dat zij van Susters en verdere familie nog te verwagten heeft noch rijker staat te worden, en het goet, door dit Huwelijk wel met er tijt onder de Blanken zou kunnen koomen, dat niet kwaat is; want al te machtige Vrije Lieden hier te hebben onder de Neegers, daar uit is al veel kwaat te vreesen, om dat het aan Onse Slaaven als eene Idee geeft, dat Sij Hoog stijgeren Kunnen als Wij.’ Letter from Governor Crommelin and Council to Society of Suriname, February 23 1764. NL-HaNA, SVS, 1.05.03, inv.no. 321 scan 335.
‘Het is ook zeeker, dat Wij meerder door een gevoele die de Negers hebben, van Onse Praeminentie boven hun, dat Wij Lieden zijn, van een beeter en edelder Natuur als zij, Ons moeten in’t midden van so een verkeert en verdraaijt geslacht staande houden, als door onse wezentlijke magt, en wat sullen sij van die Excellente Natuur al veel meer gelooven, als zij sien, dat Sij maar Vrij hebben te weesen, om sig te verbinden door een solemneele huwelijkband met Ons, en dus hun Kinderen pair & compagnion met de Onze sijn, sal die Lacheusiteit van Blanken, die sig so verneedeeren, niet in Aanmerking Koomen?’ Ibid., scan 336.
The letter claims the law banned marriages with blacks, based on a 1718 book on Suriname. The actual publication this likely referred to, however – a body of rules for plantation servants issued by Sommelsdijck in 1686, makes no mention of marriage to free black women, only of sexual relations with enslaved Africans and Amerindians and free Amerindian women. The letter writers seem to have been aware of this ambiguity, however, simply using the reference to illustrate that ‘righteous Europeans have abhorred such mixing for many years.’ For the 1686 rules, see Jacob Adriaan Schiltkamp and J. Th. de Smidt, West Indisch plakaatboek. Plakaten, ordonnantiën en andere wetten uitgevaardigd in Suriname (Amsterdam: S. Emmering, 1973) vol I [Hereafter: WIP-S Vol I], #134 (May 1686) 168.
McLeod, Elisabeth Samson, 93–101.
Jordaan, “Slavernij en vrijheid op Curaçao,” 2012, 171–74.
NL-HaNA, WIC, 1.05.01.02, inv.no. 475, Letter to the Governor and Council of Curaçao, 22 August 1752, folio 96.
J.A Schiltkamp, Bestuur en rechtspraak in de Nederlandse Antillen ten tijde van de West-Indische Compagnie (Willemstad: Rechtshogeschool van de Nederlandse Antillen, 1972); Jordaan, “Slavernij en vrijheid op Curaçao,” 2012, 173; Han Jordaan, “Free Blacks and Coloreds and the Administration of Justice in Eighteenth-Century Curaçao,” New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 84, no. 1–2 (January 1, 2010): 83.
NL-HaNA, WIC, 1.05.01.02, inv.no. 1176, Report Römer and Striddels, 4 November 1789, folio 453–468.
‘dat de Blanken zig niet schaamen, om zich in den Huwelijken staat met Vrouwen van de Coleur te begeeven; en door de familariteit welke met de Overige van de familie van zo een vrouw plaats grijpt, zij niet meer die behoorlijke onderdanigheijd voor de blanken hebben die hen toekomt. Op dit Eiland zijn niet meer dan zeven families die men kan rekenen zuiver blank te zijn; dit zijn de redenen waar om de Lieden van de Coleur veel protectie genieten.’ NL-HaNA, WIC, 1.05.01.02, inv.no. 1328, Report by Grovestins en Boeij for William V, 2 December 1789, scan 8.
Fatah-Black, Eigendomsstrijd, 116.
“Reglement van Manumissie.” #350 (July 1733) in WIP-S-I, 411–412.
J.M. van der Linde, Jan Willem Kals: leraar der Hervormden; advocaat van indiaan en neger (Kampen: Kok, 1987), 63.
“Plakaat. Aanvulling van het reglement van manumissie.” #597 (February 1761) in WIP-S-II, 726–727.
Eighteenth-century Suriname, in this sense, fits the pattern that Orlando Patterson has called ‘plantocratic co-optation’. Orlando Patterson, “Three Notes of Freedom: The Nature and Consequences of Manumission,” in Paths to Freedom: Manumission in the Atlantic World, ed. Rosemary Brana-Shute and Randy J. Sparks (Columbia, SC: Univ of South Carolina Press, 2021), 24.
David Nii Anum Kpobi, “Mission in Chains: The Life, Theology and Ministry of the Ex-Slave Jacobus E.J. Capitein (1717–1747) with a Translation of His Major Publications” (Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Zoetermeer, Utrecht University, 1993), 73–74.
NIP Vol I, 536–542. Unlike in the Dutch Republic, where couples could choose to register with either the Reformed Church or the secular authorities, as long as the marriage was finalized by the same institution as where the marriage plans were recorded, the VOC made it a rule as of 1636 that for all Christians the ondertrouw (initial registration) had to be done at the Commissarissen while the wedding had to be performed in church. NIP vol I 227.
‘Doch by aldien eenige jonge luyden, beneden hun jaeren synde ende ouders in Europa hebbende, versochten te trouwen, sal onderscheyt gemaeckt worden off deselve binnen de Vereenighde Nederlanden woonachtich ende eersaeme luyden syn ofte niet; want, indien deselve elders woonachtich ende vile luyden syn, sal by de voorschreven commissarissen, sonder groote swaericheyt te maecken, deselve bun versoeck geaccordeert worden, ten waere eenigh merckelycke reden ter contrarie. Maer soo deselve in ‘t Vaderland woonachtich ende luyden van eere syn, sal geleth worden, hoedanich degeene, die syn geboden versoeckt, van deselve gescheyden sy ende met wat porture hem in huwelyck willen begeven; want, soo hun tegen wil ende danck van hun ouders herwaerts hebben begeven ofte met een ongelyek portuyr, swartinne, oneerbaere ofte ander vuyl persoon in den echten staet trachte te verbinden, sulcx en sal by voorsz. commissarissen niet als om gewichtige redenen toegestaen worden.’ NIP Vol I, 540–541.
NIP Vol IIX, 790; Van Wamelen, Family life, 252.
Hamer, “Marriage and the Construction of Colonial Order.”
NIP Vol I, 297; Vol II, 132–134; NL-HaNa VOC 1.04.02 inv.no. 345, Register of Lords XVII’s missives, 12 April 1656, 9 May 1669, scan 665–665.
NL-HaNa VOC 1.04.02 inv.no. 316, Missive Lords XVII, 16 April 1642, Folio 373.
Van Wamelen, Family life, 353. Dienke Hondius has made a similar point for the Dutch Atlantic, arguing that the low number of non-white residents of Dutch colonies that made it to the Netherlands was a result of deliberate policies. Dienke Hondius, “Access to the Netherlands of Enslaved and Free Black Africans: Exploring Legal and Social Historical Practices in the Sixteenth–Nineteenth Centuries,” Slavery & Abolition 32, no. 3 (September 2011): 377–95.
Bosma and Raben, Being “Dutch” in the Indies, 54–65; Taylor, The Social World of Batavia, 39.
J. R. Bruijn et al., Dutch-Asiatic Shipping in the 17th and 18th Centuries, vol. 1, Rijks Geschiedkundige Publicatiën (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1987), 144.
Gemeente Archief Amsterdam – Archief van de Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk; Classis Amsterdam 379, inv.no. 224, 37.
Jordaan, “Slavernij en vrijheid op Curaçao,” 2012, 5.
WIP-CU vol II #364, 19 April 1785, 435. Jordaan, Slavernij en Vrijheid op Curaçao, 171.
V. van der Velden-Heutger and B. D. van der Velden, “Rechtspluralisme Op Curaçao: Joodse En Rooms-Katholieke Huwelijken,” in Ius Romanum-Ius Commune-Ius Hodiernum: Studies in Honour of Eltjo JH Schrage on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday, ed. Harry Dondorp et al. (Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 2010), 193–97.
In Suriname this changed in 1785, when the ban on practicing the Roman-Catholic religion was lifted. Van Lier, Samenleving in een grensgebied, 1949, 82. The presence of neighboring Spanish colonies, meanwhile meant that conversion to Catholicism – and potentially freedom – was a possibility for enslaved people who were able to cross the border from Suriname or Guyana.
Ben-Ur, “A Matriarchal Matter,” 159. In 1736 the Directors of the Society of Berbice affirmed that up to that point no Jews had settled in the colony, and that this was to stay this way, explicitly banning anyone of the Jewish ‘nation’ to move to Berbice from Suriname. NL-HaNA, SvB, 1.05.05, inv.no. 13, 18 October 1736, folio 542.
NL-HaNA, SvB, 1.05.05, inv.no. 14 (Resolutions of the Directors of the Society of Berbice) folio 82–96, 141, 202.
Plakaatboek Guyana, “Verbod aan Amerindianen die met toestemming van de meester een Amerindiaanse slavin trouwen, haar (en de dienst van die meester) weer te verlaten.” 09–09–1739. NL-HaNA, SvB, 1.05.05, inv.no. 219 folio 38–39.
NL-HaNA, SvB, 1.05.05, inv.no. 66, folio 11–15.
NL-HaNA, SvB, 1.05.05, inv.no. 14 folio 256.
For the importance of good relations with Amerindian groups for Guyanese plantation societies, see Hoonhout, Borderless Empire, 21:21–25, 33–39; Marjoleine Kars, Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast (London/New York: The New Press, 2020), 222–25.
NIP vol. II, 346, 397; vol. III, 403.
Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, Schepenbank te Batavia, access number 1.04.18.03, inv.no. 11962, interrogations July 25 1765, 15 August 1765.
Andrea C. Mosterman, Spaces of Enslavement: A History of Slavery and Resistance in Dutch New York, New Netherland Institute Studies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021), 39–41; Hamer, “Creating an Orderly Society,” 237.
For non-Dutch examples of (encouragement of) enslaved marriage in the Americas, see Silke Hensel, “Africans in Spanish-America: Slavery, Freedom and Identities in the Colonial Era,” INDIANA 24 (January 1, 2007): 15–37; Tera W. Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); Manolo Florentino and José Roberto Góes, A paz das senzalas: famílias escravas e tráfico atlântico, Rio de Janeiro, c. 1790–c. 1850 (São Paulo: Editora Unesp, 2017); Ana Silvia Volpi Scott and Dario Scott, “Between Constraint and Desire: Marriage between Enslaved People in Porto Alegre (1772–1850),” Revista Brasileira de Estudos de População 38 (July 26, 2021); On the seventeenth-century Dutch Atlantic, see Hamer, “Creating an Orderly Society,” 217–42; Mosterman, Spaces of Enslavement, 39–41.
Arsip Nsional Republik Indonesia, Doop- trouw- en begraafboeken of retroacta Burgerlijke Stand (1616–1829) [hereafter: ANRI Burgerlijke Stand], inv.no. 84.