The moral compass goes astray when making money is involved
The Dutch Republic, formed in the late 1500s by several provinces that had just broken free from Spanish rule, soon established itself as Europe’s leading bastion of religious liberty and personal freedom. Slavery was frowned upon there and never became legal in the country proper.
As Dutch merchants turned their attentions overseas in the early 1600s, they vowed to steer clear of the trade in human beings already common in the Portuguese and Spanish colonies that they hoped to supplant.
But that resolve began to give way as Dutch privateers captured ships bearing slaves and sold them off, and the Dutch conquered Portuguese sugar-cane-growing colonies in Brazil that they decided couldn’t function without slave labor.
By the late 1630s, the Dutch West India Company was a leading player in the Atlantic slave trade, and slavery wasn’t ended in Dutch colonies until 1863 — the same year as the Emancipation Proclamation in the not-exactly-on-the-abolition-forefront US.
Justin Fox Bloomberg 11 maj 2024
Heder, Sanning och Rätt
Om heder, sanning och rätt. (internetional.se)
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