ABSTRACT
The Dutch Colonial Empire expanded over the entire world during the Early Modern Age. In this process, the Dutch colonizers settled in regions where they had to cope with the presence of often sizeable indigenous populations. These represented both a threat to the colony and a potential pool of labor. Nonetheless, they remained judicially free, making the role of these populations within the socially stratified slave societies created by the Dutch particularly interesting. The question of how different Dutch companies organized their interactions with these indigenous populations, adapted to particular circumstances, and tried to use their workforce remains essential. This chapter analyzes the labor role of these free indigenous people as well as their relationship with the Dutch colonial rulers and unfree slave populations by comparing two different case studies, one in Africa, Dutch Cape Colony, and one in the Americas, the Dutch Guianas, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
