Conclusion

Slavery was a major pillar of the Dutch Atlantic, from West Africa via the insular Caribbean to the Guianas. Increasingly, free men and women of African descent were increasingly visible in the Dutch military forces, and in colonial port cities, where they were employed as domestic servants and artisans, and contributed to the maritime economy. Dutch traders became the great intermediaries of the Atlantic world, providing a reliable alternative source of European consumer goods and a market for any sort of New World products, thus enabling foreign mercantilism to function better. The great diversity of European backgrounds of the whites was a serious obstacle to the transmission of Dutchness in the colonies in Guiana and the insular Caribbean. Creolization not only marked the birth, particularly in the Guianas, of new Afro-Caribbean cultures, but equally of new cultural forms deriving from the asymmetrical “encounters” between Africans, Europeans, and to a much lesser degree Amerindians.

Contraction

In the decades on either side of 1800, the geopolitical weakness of the Dutch Republic was exposed, resulting in its collapse at home and significant contraction of its empire. This long and at times revolutionary intermezzo led to the dissolution of the WIC the loss of the Dutch broker function, and – imposed by Britain – the abolition of the slave trade. Antislavery thought had been conspicuously weak in the Republic since the early days of colonization, and virtually absent in its colonies, and publications on the Dutch colonies served to initiate its European readership in the ways money could be and was being made there. At the end of the Napoleonic period, Britain did not return the Guiana colonies it had occupied (Berbice, Demerara and Essequibo), completing a de facto takeover that had begun in the second half of the eighteenth century by British planters and merchants.