Dutch Slavery Quotes

“I continue to marvel at this. We got incredibly angry when the city of Palmyra, Syria, was destroyed by IS because the city was reminiscent of pre-Muslim times, shall we say. And I see this as an extension of that. It is nonsense to think that you can erase a past that you don't like.”
― Piet Emmer

“A give-and-take situation was created between the two sides so that that slavery could continue to exist.”
― Piet Emmer, De geschiedenis van de Nederlandse slavernij in een notendop

“Tobacco, pepper or cotton; it's all the harvest by gracious fingers of one good slave!”
― Petra Hermans

“One of the things that is constantly questioned is profitability. The thinking is mostly: the slave trade is so strange, you only drive it if you earn a lot from it. While, for example, an awful lot of slaves already died of infectious diseases while travelling across the Atlantic. I calculated that the Dutch slave trade was only an estimated 0.005 per cent of national income. So that is not much. Moreover, the Dutch slave trade is the only one that ceased to exist for economic reasons.”
― Piet Emmer, De geschiedenis van de Nederlandse slavernij in een notendop