The initial stage of an interdisciplinary project.
Grant: € 20.000 in total
Duration: 2022-2023
These days, there is a renewed focus on historical slavery and its implications for the Netherlands. Legal studies can make significant contributions to social and academic debate, for example by analysing case law and legal justification pertaining to slave trade. Within VU Amsterdam, a number of scholars is building bridges between the various academic disciplines, and between science and society.
Historians, social scholars, and jurists are joining forces to create a field of studies to shed a judicial light on historical slavery. By collecting and unlocking sources of information, and by listing court judgements on slavery and other forms of forced labour and assembling them into a collection of case law, professors and students are discovering gaps in our present-day approach to the judicial history of Dutch slavery. The team is focusing mainly on collecting and unlocking sources and data, on all territories where traders originating from the Netherlands operated and on the legal status of enslaved people within the Netherlands. They will also be researching the period after 1863 with regard to this.
Collaboration
- Faculty of Humanities
- Faculty of Law