Van Eeghen and slavery — Hart Amsterdammuseum

At the end of the last century, when I was studying history in Groningen, the subject of slavery played no role at all. Bizarre perhaps, but I didn’t think about it either. We were busy with other subjects. It cannot have escaped anyone’s attention that the situation has now changed drastically. Not only at the university, but especially in the public debate. You can’t open a newspaper without an article that has to do with slavery history. There was and is therefore a lot of overdue research to be done.

Serving the chain?

The book was recently published Serving the chain? De Nederlandsche Bank and the last decades of slavery, 1814-1863. This directly touches on my research into Piet van Eeghen. From 1859 he was a supervisory director at DNB and from 1864 chairman of the supervisory board. In that last period, slavery had ‘already’ been abolished, but what about his interests before that?

I can say one thing with certainty: Piet van Eeghen never bought or sold people himself. But that says little since the Netherlands – not to be confused with – the slave trade slavery – had already abolished before his birth. But his ancestors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not engage in the slave trade either. They traded in everything, but not in people. Slave trade and slavery were difficult to reconcile with the Anabaptist faith.

Between ideals and practice

Moreover, Piet van Eeghen lived in Réveil circles and slavery did not fit in there either. Prominent Réveilmen such as Reverend Heldring – with whom Van Eeghen spent a lot of time – were mainly concerned with social injustice in their own country, but also advocated the abolition of slavery. The problem with Piet van Eeghen is that he has not spoken out about it. At least I couldn’t find anything about it. No statements for or against slavery. He was active in all kinds of social areas, but not here. Why not actually?

Van Eeghen was always more concerned with Amsterdam than with the rest of the world. But I also think that in terms of slavery he was caught between ideals and practice. He was not one to applaud a system of systematic exploitation. On the contrary. But he was at the helm of a company that traded in colonial products, such as sugar, coffee and tobacco. In that respect he did benefit from slavery. During the period when Piet was a partner at Van Eeghen & Co, the emphasis of trade shifted from West to East, but slavery and forced labor also existed in the Dutch East Indies. A large part of the money came from there, which he invested in charities in his own city.

Uncle and cousin Jan

Piet van Eeghen is not mentioned as an interested party in the book on slavery and DNB. But his uncle Jan, who was director of DNB from 1829 to 1838. He had direct interests in slavery, partly because he owned a sugar refinery on the Rozengracht, where sugar from Suriname was processed. His son, also a Jan van Eeghen, is on the list of Dutchmen who were compensated for the loss of their ‘property’ on the slave plantations when it was abolished in 1863 in ‘De West’.

Piet van Eeghen is not on this long list from 1863, where I did find a number of Van Hasselts (fodder for a subsequent investigation). At the time of abolition, he therefore had no shares in a plantation, let alone ‘owned’ enslaved people. But at his death in 1889, Van Eeghen did own a number of shares in Surinamese plantations. By then they had been worthless for a quarter of a century. He probably inherited them at some point and never benefited from them. But he did.

Search this National Archives database for people declared free in 1863 and for owners who received compensation.