The "Dark Dimension" of Dutch History: Recent Developments in the Historiography of Black Africans in Early Modern Europe

Historians and art historians have overlooked the history of Africans and Asians in Europe for a long time. Several decades after the European colonial empires vanished and a multicultural and multiracial Europe developed, new research questions are emerging. Europe remained ‘white’ for centuries, in spite of its colonial empires, but not entirely. This paper presents the long absence of  a visible black community in Europe as the result of practical restrictions as well as conscious legal exclusion, and explains new historical research into some of the first black Africans, Jews, and Muslims, coming to various parts of  the Netherlands from the 16^th century onward.