Karwan Fatah-Black

“The supreme power of the people”: Local autonomy and radical democracy in the Batavian revolution (1795–1798)

ABSTRACT The Batavian Revolution of 1795 that overthrew the old stadtholderly regime of the Dutch Republic was followed by a period of intense political conflict in which popular mobilization played a key role. Among revolutionary elites, the main dividing line between moderates and radicals occurred around questions concerning the reorganization of the state apparatus and the writing of a new constitution. A full rejection of the federative model of the state that had characterized the former Dutch Republic became central to the repertoire of the radical faction in the National Convention. However, instances of protest and rebellion from below, often supported by the radicals in the Convention, generally remained conspicuously local in focus. This clash between national ideals and highly localized realities remains one of the central paradoxes of the Batavian Revolution. The form in which this process unfolded was peculiar to the trajectory of the Batavian Revolution, which more than any of its counterparts became centered on constitutional issues. But severe tensions between programs for the rationalization of state bureaucracy along nationalizing lines and popular support for far-reaching local autonomy existed in each of the Atlantic Revolutions. In January 1797, radical democrats in Leiden attempted to find an organizational form to solve this problem. They called for a national gathering of representatives from local revolutionary clubs and neighborhood assemblies. The response by the moderate provincial and national authorities was remarkably swift, and the initiative was repressed before the meeting could take place. Examining the failure of this unique attempt to bridge the divide between local popular mobilization and national revolutionary programs, as well as the discussion that followed this failure, can help us understand the possibilities and limitations of Batavian radicalism.

A profitable debate

Our gross margins approach is a blunt tool, which has – far more than we expected – improved scholarly understanding of the direct and indirect economic impact of the slave trade. The authors of the rejoinder have raised doubts about the usefulness of our method as a way to test the Williams’ thesis. We never set out to test the Williams’ thesis, which makes much of the rejoinder superfluous. We are disappointed with the misrepresentations of our research and arguments in the rejoinder. We have encountered such debating strategies in previous academic exchanges, and would like to emphasize again that we think this is unfruitful and unproductive for advancing scholarly debate. We also find it problematic that the respondents present old data as new findings. This is a step back for the historiography. We want to address the issues raised by Pieter Emmer et al. and look at the five years since we made our calculations and wrote our original Dutch article. We find that the new research that has ensued after we published the Dutch version of this article in 2012 is really exciting and has resulted in promising findings.

Beyond Profitability: The Dutch Transatlantic Slave Trade and its Economic Impact

Dutch research into the slave trade and its importance to the Dutch economy has often limited itself to investigating the financial success of slave trading companies, calculating the success of slaving by its profit rates. The central argument made in this article is that gross margin is a better indicator for the importance of the slave trade to the Dutch Republic. Even if a slave trading company did not make a net profit on a voyage, such a voyage led to extra activities such as shipbuilding or the production of trade goods. This article provides a reconstruction of this gross margin for the entire period that the Dutch were engaged in the trans-Atlantic slave trade by combining the most recent data on the size of the slave trade (including illicit trade) with data on both African and American price data of slaves.

White Lies and Black Markets

In this volume, Fatah-Black untangles the ways in which metropolitan authorities were defied and evaded in the process of making Suriname a productive plantation colony between 1650 and 1800.