Unlike most city histories, this book focuses exclusively on the city’s connections with colonialism and slavery. Rotterdam, the second-largest Dutch city, is one of Europe’s leading ports. Its maritime expansion was intrinsically linked to Dutch colonialism, including slave trading and colonial slavery in the Americas, Africa and Asia. This painful history sits uneasily with the city’s modern cosmopolitan image and its large population of ‘new Rotterdammers’ with colonial roots. The present volume provides a summary of the research that has documented this history, with chapters on the contribution of colonial trade to economic development; the city’s involvement in slavery; the role of the urban political elites; the impact on urban development and architecture; the ‘ethical impulse’; colonial art and ethnographic collections; colonial and postcolonial migration; and finally the resonance of this history in postcolonial Rotterdam.

Gert Oostindie is Director of the KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies in Leiden, and Professor of Colonial and Postcolonial History at Leiden University. He has published widely on slavery, colonialism, decolonization, postcolonial migration and the relevance of the colonial past for contemporary society.

Contents

I Colonial and Postcolonial Rotterdam
Gert Oostindie

II Rotterdam’s Colonial Connections. Shipping and Trade, Industry and Finance
Gerhard de Kok

III Rotterdam and Transatlantic Slavery
Alex van Stipriaan

IV Civic Government and Businessmen in Rotterdam: Colonial Cross-fertilization
Henk den Heijer
V More than Meets the Eye. Traces of a Colonial Past in the City of Rotterdam
Pauline K.M. van Roosmalen

VI Colonial Rotterdam: a Hotbed for Dutch Missionary Work, 1797-1977
Tom van den Berge

VII A Never-ending Story. Colonial Collections in Rotterdam
Alexandra van Dongen and Liane van der Linden

VIII Making a Home in Rotterdam. Colonial and Postcolonial Migrants To and From the City
Esther Captain

IX The Road is Mine. The Summer Carnival as a Case Study for Postcolonial Rotterdam
Francio Guadeloupe, Paul van de Laar & Liane van der Linden

About the Authors

Index