Curaçao, Aruba, Bonaire, Sint Maarten, Sint Eustatius and Saba, known as the Dutch Antilles, are located in the Caribbean Sea. In 1634 the Netherlands, a seafaring nation in north-western Europe, took possession of the islands. Thereafter, for temporary periods they were in the hands of France, Spain and the UK, but since 1816 they have been subject to the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The Dutch West India Company (WIC) controlled the country's trade and shipping to the Americas, West Africa and the Caribbean and had the state monopoly on the transatlantic slave trade. The population comprised the Indigenous people, Europeans from the Netherlands (including a small number of Jews) and slaves transported from Africa by the WIC. The slaves lived and worked on plantations under very harsh conditions, which provoked the slave uprising under the leadership of Tula in 1795.

Dutch became the official language on the islands. The Creole language Papiamentu (Papiamento) of Curaçao, Aruba and Bonaire developed during the years when slavery flourished. The most likely theory about the origin of Papiamentu is that the enslaved, originating from different parts of Africa and having no common language, created a way to communicate. In 2003–7, Papiamentu was recognised as an official language alongside Dutch. English is spoken on Sint Maarten, Sint Eustatius and Saba alongside Dutch.

The Dutch Antilles, then known as Curaçao and Dependencies, were controlled by a colonial board on Curaçao and had governors from the Netherlands until 1962. The political relationship between the six islands and the Netherlands was organised in 1954 by the Charter for the Kingdom of the Netherlands (the Statute), through which they were united as a single country, the Netherlands Antilles. In 1986 Aruba separated from the Netherlands Antilles and became an autonomous country with a special status. On 10 October 2010, the Netherlands Antilles was dissolved. Curaçao and Sint Maarten joined Aruba as semi-autonomous constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, with their own legislation, parliaments and governments. Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba – also known as the BES islands, the Dutch Caribbean or the Caribbean Netherlands – became public bodies of the Netherlands