In his pivotal study on British abolitionist rhetoric, Brycchan Carey sets out the importance of sentimentality in the development of abolitionist thought and political antislavery interventions along genre lines. Central to this type of discourse, also wielded in the Dutch metropole, was “a belief in the power of sympathy to raise awareness of suffering, to change an audience’s view of that suffering, and to direct their opposition to it.” What abolitionist authors had in common was indeed a paramount confidence in the fact that passions and pathos were generally more persuasive than intellectual arguments. Sentimental fiction, as Lynn Hunt has famously argued in Inventing Human Rights, invariably took a stand on the side of victims of sexual oppression, social exclusion, or unjust (colonial) policies, and sought to play upon bourgeois values of compassion and human rights. One literary site where authors pre-eminently drew on audiences’ faculty of fellow- feeling was the theater—a genre that remains remarkably absent from Carey’s and Hunt’s studies. This chapter examines how Dutch thespians, playwrights, and translators invited readers and spectators to sympathize with enslaved Africans and Asians and challenged them to espouse the antislavery cause through a set of genre-typical strategies. It will turn to Adriaan van der Willigen’s Selico (1794), P.G. Witsen Geysbeek’s De negers (1796), and Dirk van Hogendorp’s Kraspoekol, of de slaaverny (1800) to explore the constellation of the enslaved as objects of pity for their white counterparts, both on and off the stage.

This chapter will detail the typology of the contented fool in Dutch theater and examine how s/he functioned in the popularization of antislavery sentiment. Rendered by white actors in blackface, happy-go-lucky slaves and servants were given a personality that quickly enthralled Dutch audiences, neatly articulating how they resigned themselves to their servitude. In a time when the metropole debated over fundamental equality and feared resistance in its colonies, the contented fool, even imaginary, may have impersonated a romantic idyll of Afro-diasporic people who acknowledged the semiotics assigned to their skin color. Black makeup seems to have been a key element in the creation of this performative template, which drew on novel theorizations about race that crystallized causal connections between a non-white skin, minimal intelligence, and inherent servility. It is no coincidence that such racist stereotypes appeared in productions that were in fact critical of slavery. As Jan Nederveen Pieterse has shown in his transnational study Wit over zwart, racism came to the fore in white-penned antislavery texts “as the buffer between abolition and equality.” If social boundaries between the master and the enslaved would disappear with the abrogation of slavery, racial inequality enabled the white middle classes to maintain their moral superiority. In that sense, the dispossessed Black body became an imaginative surface onto which theatergoers projected their own understanding of themselves and their dominion over people of color, both in and outside the legal frame of slavery.

This list solely contains plays in which an antislavery stance is promoted through textual and staging practices, written and translated in(to) Dutch between 1770 and 1810. It does not include plays that fall outside this timeframe and/or address slavery only indirectly, such as Jean Rochefort’s pantomimic ballet Isabelle en Don Ferdinant, of het Indiaansch feest (1802) or Zuma, of de ontdekking van den kinabast (1817)—the first does not directly address the institution of slavery and the second was published after 1810. Neither does this list mention so-called “Black ballets” or refer to productions such as De Schone Negerin, of Europeanen in Schipbreuk gered door Africaansche Negers (1792) because I was unable to retrieve details about their exact content. For clarity, and in order to stimulate transnational work on antislavery theater, I have added brief descriptions of each play.

This chart does not include performances of plays in languages other than Dutch and only concerns performances that took place in what is now the Netherlands—this means that performances in the former colonies or in today’s Belgium have not been listed. While drawing it, I have consulted online databases such as Delpher and Onstage, as well as private repertoire lists compiled by Anna de Haas and Bennie Pratasik. I also drew on information from secondary literature, including the works of Haverkorn van Rijsewijk, Gillhof, and van der Heijden and Sanders. There are undoubtedly performances that I have overlooked, and I believe that many more have gone unrecorded. Here, I have merely wanted to offer an indication of where and how many times these plays have been put on stage.

Written in 1774, Nicolaas Simon van Winter’s Monzongo, of de koningklyke slaaf was the most popular antislavery production staged across the Netherlands until well into the nineteenth century. In a sentimental preface, van Winter attests that he created the tragedy in response to the nearly successful slave revolt in the Dutch colony of Berbice in 1763. He had been particularly shocked by the brutal ways in which the rebellion’s leaders were hanged, burnt alive, or tortured on the rack once the revolt was rooted out, and by the apathetic news coverage of the events in the Dutch metropole. With Monzongo, van Winter hoped “to show [his compatriots] the brutalities of slavery; let them hear the voice of humanity and natural law, and elicit sympathy.” Despite its explicit and stirring preface, however, Monzongo is not set in Berbice and does not address the excesses of the transatlantic slavery system. Instead, it stages an insurrection plotted by the enslaved king of Veragua (today’s Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama), Monzongo, against his Spanish oppressor in early-sixteenth-century Mexico.

There were good reasons for van Winter to opt for a distant episode of colonialism in preference to staging a direct critique of the wrongs in the Dutch Atlantic. First, van Winter himself was engaged in the slavery-based trade as a merchant and shareholder of the Amsterdam company Jacob Muhl & van Winter, which marketed Campeche wood and indigo from Honduras and Curaçao.

The survey of Repertoires of Slavery spans the decades between 1770 and 1810, a period marked by fundamental political, economic, and ideological change on a global scale. In the Netherlands, these decades generated a recession of the (colonial) economy, the consolidation of bourgeois mentality, and severe political unrest. All of these issues were abundantly discussed in and shaped by Dutch culture which was in itself increasingly politicized. This first chapter will delve into the contexts in which the repertoire was produced, performed, and consumed in order to allow for a better understanding of the analyses in the following three chapters. It first sketches a nonexhaustive overview of how the Dutch, through private and public investors, entered human trafficking and the slavery-based trade in the Atlantic and Asian orbits in the early seventeenth century and continued to benefit from them throughout the eighteenth century. The chapter goes on to describe the Dutch revolutionary period at the turn of the nineteenth century and to examine how it impacted the course of colonial management and slavery politics. The third section then concisely outlines the development and nature of Dutch abolitionist sentiment and slave-led resistance in the overseas territories. A final section turns to the ways in which theatrical culture of the Netherlands in 1800 offered an environment in which a broad audience learned about domestic and colonial affairs through a variety of dramatic genres and looks at how the institution of theater was intrinsically connected to municipal, national, and imperial politics.

This book has attempted to chart the erratic ideological terrain of abolitionism through the lens of white-produced theater in the Netherlands around 1800. An extensive set of tropes, linguistic variations, staging practices, illustrations, choreographies, characters, and plotlines worked on a dramatic realm of abolition that hoped to mobilize audiences for a crusade against the institutions of the slave trade and slavery. However, this theatrical discourse of reform was less univocal than its surface suggests. I have focused attention on the coding of three recurring stage templates—captive Africans and Asians as objects of pity, forbearing fools, and vengeful rebels—to explore how they related to interests other than what dramatists primarily had in mind. The “counterpoints” and tensions identified in the antislavery repertoire resulted from the convergence of a genuine abolitionist impulse with the enduring imperialist frame wherein authors, thespians, and audiences operated.

Fundamentally, what Repertoires of Slavery has shown is that the critical scenarios of slavery broadcast to Dutch reading and theatergoing audiences were deeply imbued with competing discourses of profitability, race, and the claim to human rights. A virtual consensus emerges in the abolitionist repertoire that slavery violated Christian and bourgeois values of compassion and familial love, and incited revolutionary notions of freedom, equality, and autonomy—even if the system in Asia was falsely depicted as small-scale and domestic compared to the plantation economy of the Caribbean, it remained clear that slavery in the VOC territories was equally dehumanizing and in violation of principles of liberty and integrity. The blackface characters that populated the stage of 1800 testified to the coffle, repeated abuse, and the cruel separation from their loved ones, thus cogently expressing the imperative necessity for humanitarian reform. The same repertoire, however, emanates the belief that the plantation economy could not be abandoned because it contributed so much to the metropole’s prowess. Simultaneously, it attests to the damaging ideas on race offered by philosophers and anatomists who connected physical appearance to intellect, morality, and worth and propagated white Europeans’ complete superiority and centrality vis-à-vis others. No sooner are Ada (in De negers) and Cery (in Stedman) manumitted, for instance, than they gratefully offer their eternal services in exchange for paternalist protection.

Chapter 5 applies the argument of this book to the beginning of the Macron presidency. Initially, Macron implemented a series of liberalizing reforms, notably of taxation, collective bargaining, and the national railways, often over the opposition of strikers and demonstrators. However, after just eighteen months in office, simmering resentment erupted into the so-called yellow vest protests, a movement against higher gasoline taxes that spiraled into a broader contestation of the government itself. Chapter 5 shows that both the social anesthesia state and skinny politics contributed to the yellow vest movement. In a context of scarce fiscal resources due to the social anesthesia state, Macron’s desire to bolster French business through tax cuts while reducing France’s budget deficit necessarily entailed tax increases and cutbacks in public and social services for the general population. Further fueling contestation, Macron adopted an extreme form of skinny politics, disdaining negotiations with political elites and the social partners, and imposing reforms from above. The combination of unpopular reform, much of it liberal in nature, and skinny politics sparked the yellow vest protests. In the end, the yellow vests forced Macron to backtrack from his agenda, sent his approval ratings plummeting, and weakened his capacity to govern.