History of sugar, and slavery, at Amsterdam museum

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History of sugar, and slavery, at Amsterdam museum

Date: 10/28/05 at 8:22PM

Mood: Thinking

Playing: Sugar, sugar, by The Archies

At the moment [in 2005], there is an exhibition on the history of sugar at the Amsterdam historical museum in The Netherlands.

On my way there, the train goes through the Haarlemmermeer region, an important sugar beet growing area. Most of its beets used to go to the Amsterdam refineries when they were still there.

I see two cormorants, sitting on a canal bank.

The exhibition includes the continents of Asia, Africa, America, and Europe; but focusing on Amsterdam.

Sugar cane originates from Asia.

In the sixteenth century, the first century of European overseas colonialism, Spaniards and Portuguese brought it to South America.

There, sugar plantations made profitable by African slave labour, arose.

In the seventeenth century, sugar, on its own or in combinations with other new habits like tea or coffee, already played a major part in the lives of the better off strata of Europe.

It played a major role in the world economy; and world politics.

Then, the ruling classes of the rising Dutch Republic (in a war of independence against Spain, which occupied Portugal then) violently tried to become a major player in the emerging world sugar market.

They conquered most of Portuguese-Spanish Brazil in the 1630s.

They discovered its sugar plantations could only be profitable by importing still more slaves from Africa.

To do this, they then conquered the major slave port Luanda in Angola from the Portuguese.

That way, the Dutch West Indies Company became a major player in the trans-Atlantic slave trade which they had not been before.

So, sugar led to slavery and war. Slavery led to more slavery. War led to more war.

The Portuguese managed to re-conquer Brazil in 1654.

The Dutch former governor of Brazil, Johan Maurits van Nassau, retired to his house in The Hague, nicknamed the Sugar House.

Its official name is Mauritshuis. It is today still a major landmark, close to Parliament, of the Dutch government city of The Hague.

It houses the major arts museum of that city.

Dutch interested in sugar plantations, after losing Brazil, had to move to other areas, like Suriname and Berbice (later: British Guyana; today: Guyana).

In Berbice in 1763-1764, there was a major slave uprising against cruel Dutch slave-owners.

Starting at one plantation, Magdalenenburg, the rebels went to other plantations to get the slaves there to join the fight for freedom.

After a year, fresh troops shipped in from The Netherlands managed to defeat the slaves.

119 slave prisoners were executed.

At the Amsterdam sugar exhibition, there is a display, including a sound presentation, on the Berbice slave revolt.

In the parts of the exhibition on Suriname, the Maroons are briefly mentioned: slaves who ran away from the plantations to found their own villages beyond the slave-owners’ control.

Surinamese women’s headscarves, commemorating the end of slavery, are also on display.

Slavery in the Dutch colonies officially ended in 1863.

However, the ex-slaves were not really free yet.

They were tied to ten-year contracts to continue to work as indentured workers for the same ex(?) slave-owners.

The end of slavery was not the end of exploitation.

Correctly in the Amsterdam museum, an exhibit headline on the post 1863 period says New exploitation.

But apart from the Berbice uprising, and on the Suriname Maroons and commemorations of slavery after it ended, in my view a weak point of this extensive and interesting exhibition is its lack of attention for the resistance to the sugar magnates by “lower classes” like slaves or workers.

The exhibition deals extensively with Marienburg sugar factory in Suriname, for instance.

However, it never mentions the major strikes by its workers there in the twentieth century.

When I asked someone of the museum for the reason for this, she replied that there are writings on, eg, the Marienburg strikes.

However, she thought that just writings, without photographs or other interesting looking exhibits, would not really interest the visitors.

In Indonesia, then a Dutch colony where sugar export to The Netherlands was important in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, workers used to have various ways of resistance against the plantation and factory owners.

This resistance is also not at the exhibition.

Neither are strikes by sugar refinery workers in Amsterdam or elsewhere in The Netherlands.

In the eighteenth century, Amsterdam became the sugar refinery capital of the world.

Amsterdam sugar refineries then typically employed about twelve workers.

The centralisation of capital, about which Karl Marx would write in the next century, had not yet progressed really far.

In the nineteenth century, a sugar refinery in Amsterdam had four hundred workers.

Fires

In the eighteenth century, there were very many fires, especially in the Jordaan.

That part of the city was poor and densely populated.

But it also was close to water for transportation by ship.

So, even though sugar refineries were fire hazards, where fires often killed many inhabitants of the houses around them, the industry had so much political clout that the refineries stayed.

As happened even with one of the few refineries in the posh central part of the city: a fire destroyed it; and the owner managed to have it rebuilt, in spite of protests by people living around the refinery.

As the trans-Atlantic slave trade had been established by sugar cane and other economic forces; the fight to abolish it by nineteenth century anti slavery campaigners was helped by the rise of sugar beet agriculture in Europe; competition for reed sugar.

After an early nineteenth century slump, sugar became big in The Netherlands again.

Sinterklaas

It also had cultural influence, eg, on the Saint Nicholas (later evolved into US Santa Claus) celebrations, making 5 December a major day on the Dutch calendar.

In 1850, Jan Schenkman published his influential book on the Saint Nicholas celebration, Sint Nicolaas en zijn knecht.

Though incorporating some really traditional elements, Schenkman was an example of “invention of tradition“.

The original Saint Nicholas tradition was about an Orthodox Christian bishop from what is now Turkey, a friend of children; not an owner of African slaves. While Schenkman wrote that Saint Nicholas owned an African slave.

The restyling by Schenkman and others, among other aspects, had two sides related to sugar: many of the presents for children, later also for adults, were sweets or otherwise contained much sugar.

And from now on, Piet (Peter), as later post Schenkman authors called the black servant of Bishop Nicholas, played a major role during the holiday.

Authors like Schenkman based Piet on (caricatures of) the black slaves then in the Dutch colonies of Surinam and the Antilles.

Still about 1960, a child opened a book of “traditional” Saint Nicholas songs.

One song line went: “Servant Piet, as black as soot, with a chain around his foot …”

The chain was also depicted in the picture on the same page.

“Mummy, why does Piet have a chain around his foot?”

“Because he is a slave, my child!”

Since about 1960, many people immigrated into The Netherlands from Suriname.

Many of them see the present role of Zwarte Piet in the Saint Nicholas celebrations as insulting to the memory of the victims of slavery and as racist.

Sometimes, these objections get reactions of the type: “Zwarte Piet does not have anything to do with slavery!”

History shows otherwise.

The famous nineteenth century Concert Building of Amsterdam was built with profits from sugar business in Indonesia, then officially called Netherlands Indies.

So were the North Sea canal, linking Amsterdam to the sea; and the Central Station.

Sugar does not seem ever to be that far from questions of political and economic power; as it is still discussed now at WTO and similar meetings.

Sugar: A Bittersweet History, by Elizabeth Abbott (Duckworth Overlook, £20): here.

Sevilla la Nueva, the first European settlement in Jamaica, is home to the bittersweet story of the beginning of the Caribbean sugar trade: here.

Where did African slaves come from? See here.

Archaeology of US Abolitionism vs. Donald Trump: here.

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