A parallel ? - bailout of the banks in 2009 and bailout of Dutch slave owners in 1863 - by Rick Morren

EU-Digest editorial

A parallel? - bailout of the banks in 2009 and bailout of Dutch slave owners in 1863 - by Rick Morren

There is an interesting historical parallel between todays bailout of the banks by governments in the US and Europe and the bailout of Dutch slave owners in 1863 by the Netherlands Government.

When slavery was abolished in all colonies of the Dutch Kingdom on July 1, 1863 there were some 45.000 slaves. Most of them (34.000) lived in the former Dutch colony of Suriname, on the North Eastern coast of South America. Even though the Netherlands in 1848 had already decided that there should come an end to slavery, it took another 15 year before they got their act together as to the procedures which had to be put in place to make this happen. The main issue facing the Dutch Government at that time was how to re-activate the plantation based local colonial economies after their "free labor pool" would cease to exist.

Then, as is the case today, when it comes to bailouts, the Netherlands government of that time hardly considered what the economic impact of the abolishment of slavery would have on the freed slaves, but instead worried more about how to compensate the slave owners for the loss of their "free workforce" and on keeping them tied to the local economy.

Eventually the Dutch Government came up with a "bailout plan" which provided slave owners 300 "guilders" (euro 130) compensation for each slave they had lost as a result of the "emancipation process" in the hope that the slave owners would reinvest this capital back into the local economy, or by hiring former slaves to work their plantations. Unfortunately, nothing of the sort happened. Many unscrupulous plantation owners "cooked" the information on their books about the number of slaves they had and were compensated even for slaves that had died, or ran away; some sold their plantations to speculators; but most of them took their money and left the country. The formally thriving Suriname agriculture based economy could not be reactivated without the active participation of all the parties involved. History seems to tell us over and over again that economic trickle down policies, which failed in the past will also not work today.