The Dutch Atlantic by Kwame Nimako & Glenn Willemsen

Author:Kwame Nimako & Glenn Willemsen [Kwame Nimako and Glenn Willemsen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pluto Press
Published: 2017-03-12T16:00:00+00:00

ABOLITION AND CITIZENSHIP

We mentioned in Chapter 2 that after the French Revolution, European citizens became stakeholders in their states. At the background of the issue of slavery and abolition is the fact that European citizens, who became colonists of large territories such as the United States and Brazil, had revolted against their mother countries and formed independent states to manage their own enslaved populations (see Chapter 6). Thus, viewed in the context of ‘citizens as stakeholders in the state’, the legal abolition debate was a discussion between the government as the custodian of the state, and representatives of the enslavers as citizens. The enslaved were considered as subhuman and non-citizens. Abolition and emancipation thus constituted a conflict resolution between the Dutch state and sections of its citizens.

To enforce their point of view, as we have seen, supporters of the bill repeatedly referred to the disturbances that had taken place in the English and French colonies. They viewed these events as a classic example of the way things should not be handled: the plantation owners were ruined, freedmen had turned away from the plantations and refused to work when there was enough land where they could settle, the English treasury had lost a great deal of money, and the British economy was suffering from reduced imports from the Caribbean territory.

To members who supported legal abolition, the West Indian form of emancipation was, on the contrary, a source of inspiration from which lessons could be learned. And so they wondered why the government, in spite of the negative experience of the British with apprenticeship, still proposed establishing state control.

What lessons could be learned from the emancipation in the Caribbean territory? This was the subject of an intense debate throughout the nineteenth century. Alexis de Tocqueville concluded in 1839 that a period of transition after emancipation was necessary to keep the plantation system from falling apart; at the same time, he remarked that the system of apprenticeship had failed, because in the eyes of the black population it was too close to slavery. He suggested another solution: the state should intervene between the two parties – planters and liberated slaves. The state had to see to it that the blacks would still offer their services to the plantation owners – that is, on the government’s conditions – and that they would not fall back into barbarism and idleness.

It is clear that white people defined freedom for blacks in a very narrow and limited way, as though they could not understand what freedom meant to the blacks. They realized that the government had liberated the blacks, but on the other hand they still wanted to exercise supervision over them. That is why conflicts arose from the very first working day. To the plantation owners, freedom still meant hierarchy and masterhood – not a right for the black population, but a privilege. In their concept, legal freedom did not signify economic independence or equal civil and political rights for the blacks; hence the pressure on freedmen to negotiate labour contracts, while they were denied equal rights.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.