Research project
Households and Enslavement in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Empire
How did colonial law work to turn people into property? This project argues that colonial ideas about households and domestic authority were critical to legal processes of enslavement in the early modern Dutch empire. Using colonial court records from Dutch Brazil, Suriname, and the Moluccas, the project explores how households functioned as a legal and social space for imposing and resisting slavery.
- Duration
- 2024 - 2027
- Contact
- Timo McGregor
- Funding
-
NWO
Recent scholarship has emphasised the diversity and fluidity of coercive labour practices in early modern Dutch colonies. Yet the legal and political ideas underpinning this spectrum of coercion remain poorly understood. Legal historians have tended to focus on metropolitan jurists’ debates about Roman law and just wars that portrayed enslavement as a single moment of capture. Such approaches offer limited insight into the legal norms and strategies that enabled more gradual and ambiguous processes of coercion and enslavement.
This project instead asks how colonial legal ideas enabled and connected diverse forms of slaving. It does so by examining the ideological significance of a key institution in coercive labour regimes: the household. From homesteads to haciendas, households formed a critical space in which enslavement could be imposed, concealed, and contested. Household heads wielded absolute patriarchal authority over spouses and children, rights to regulate the activities of servants, and legal authority to violently discipline subordinates. Such expansive claims to dominium over dependents blurred lines between the right to command and the right to own people, enabling household heads to hold indentured workers, bonded debtors, and convict labourers in perpetual bondage. Across Dutch and other European colonies, households formed a connective legal tissue sustaining different forms of coercive labour and pathways into slavery.
Using case studies from seventeenth-century Dutch colonies in Suriname, Brazil, and the Moluccas, I explore how such ideas about household authority served as an ideological, legal, and social framework for imposing and resisting slavery. To understand how this worked in practice, I make use of colonial legal archives. These contain court records, petitions, and notarial documents, detailing the everyday quarrels and disputes of colonial life. Such legal contests could raise questions about household dominium in various ways. For instance, they might dispute the right of household heads to punish servants or control the movements of subordinates, or to transport households across jurisdictions. Rather than the outcomes of individual conflicts, I am interested in the ways they forced the articulation of legal norms and assumptions about household structures and their ability to control workers. Collectively, I argue, these everyday contests worked to place households and domestic authority at the heart of local and regional legal regimes of slavery.
Significance
In comparing Brazil, Suriname, and Ambon and I emphasize how these colonies were active spaces of enslavement—not just places to which colonists transported enslaved people. Particularly in Dutch Brazil and Suriname, the enslavement of Indigenous people remains understudied and is often overshadowed by transatlantic slavery. In part, this is because Indigenous slavery was hidden within households. Colonists circumvented laws against Indigenous slavery by labelling workers as household dependents rather than slaves. Focusing on enslavement within households, therefore promises to illuminate an important but understudied form of slavery in these colonies.
My focus on households also represents a significant reframing of the legal history of slavery. Recent scholarship has given us a much more sophisticated understanding of the range of different forms of coerced labour in Dutch colonies. Many of these insights stem from the work of social historians using legal records to reconstruct the lived experiences of bonded workers. But there has not been as much attention to the role of the law in enabling the process of enslavement itself. When scholars have examined the legalities of enslavement, the focus has generally been on metropolitan natural law theorists or on colonial legal codes and the proclamations of the WIC, EIC or the States General. This emphasis on public law misses the importance of the quasi-private jurisdiction of households as one of the primary battlegrounds where slavery was legally constructed and contested. Centring household legal politics reveals a largely hidden story about how fundamental social and legal ideas about domestic authority facilitated enslavement and enabled movement along a spectrum of coercive labour arrangements.
This approach also promises new understandings of both local and global connections between legal cultures of slavery. On the one hand, focusing on household politics can illuminate how local practices of enslavement developed out of interactions between European and Indigenous or Moluccan legal cultures. Households were not a European phenomenon. The idea of household authority over dependents translated easily across many legal cultures and households served as spaces for cross-cultural negotiation and contestation of ideas about authority, slavery, and domesticity. At the same time, a focus on households can help us understand connections between European legal regimes of slavery. Households were global vectors of slave law, circulating within and across European empires and often becoming focal points for regional conflicts . By examining how the ideological bedrock of household dominium connected practices of enslavement in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, my project will work to bridge the long-divided historiographies of these regions and point towards new understandings of early modern slavery as an interconnected global phenomenon.
