Genealogy & Genetic History Of The Dutch Caribbean

In his seminal work on Curacao, published in 1958, Harmannus Hoetink described the island's social structure and the interrelations of social groups in the period before 1870. Since this book, Curacao's social history during slavery has been little studied. Recent Caribbean history has devoted more attention to society in the plantation era by studying slaves as well as free men and women of African descent. This article focuses on the free blacks and mulattoes in Curacao in the eighteenth century. Two general questions are addressed here: what was the position of the free non-whites in Curacaon society, and how were they viewed by the white elite? In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Curacao, a Dutch colony since 1634, was largely dependent on comme ree. Most transactions took place along the nearby "coast of Caracas," the central littoral of present-day Venezuela, which supplied a vast array of products. Trade relations were also maintained with New Gr...

ABSTRACT This article shows that the boundaries between free people of color and enslaved people were blurry on the Netherlands Antilles from the mid-eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries. This blurriness stemmed from a few factors. One factor was the predominantly urban slavery system, in which enslaved people were hired out to work for others. Urban slavery allowed for a relative degree of liberty for enslaved people to move about the islands, and a concomitant freedom to determine the course of their days – with whom they associated, where they worked, and, most importantly, the chance to earn money with which to buy their freedom, thereby increasing the number of freed people of color. This system, in turn, also made it harder to differentiate who was enslaved and who was free, thus scrambling entrenched categories between enslaved and free people. Another related factor was demographic. In part due to the possibility to buy freedom afforded by urban slavery, in...