The Transimperial Slave Trade: Dutch Entrepreneurs in Other Empires

In 1685, the protestant Dutch Balthasar Coymans (1652-1686) obtained the Spanish Asiento de Negros, the exclusive right granted by the Spanish King to introduce a stipulated number of enslaved people into the Spanish Americas. To comply with the terms in the contract, Coymans was required to introduce more than 22,000 enslaved people into the Spanish Americas within 4,5 years. The Dutch newspapers spoke of the ‘great victory for the Dutch Nation.’[1]

The Coymans asiento is one of the many examples of entrepreneurs exploiting the empires of others. Limited by chartered companies and institutions in their home states, entrepreneurs looked for opportunities across borders, more often than not finding a loophole in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Historiography on the trans-Atlantic slave trade and more generally early modern colonialism, however, remains within nationalist and imperial borders, looking at slave traders from metropoles trading in enslaved people to parts of its empire. The Dutch are an excellent case to illustrate, however, that if we want to understand the complexities of early modern colonialism in full, we should approach this history not from a national, but transnational, and preferably transimperial perspective.

[1] Delpher, Haerlemsche Courant, 8 March 1685. Original citation: ‘een seer groote genade voor de Hollantse Natie.’