ABSTRACT
The focus of this article is on linguistic strategies of commodification, racialisation, and humanisation in the archive of the Dutch slave trade. Against the traditional economic approach to the historical study of documents produced by Dutch slave traders, this chapter centres the role of seemingly empirical, self-evident (ideological) language in the normalisation, naturalisation, and reproduction of the social system of slavery. In particular, it will discuss the ritualised and hierarchically enforced employment of specific terminology, tenses, limited economic narratives, and calculative discursive appropriation of humanity for the purposes of enslavement in view of their role in reproducing the racialising mercantile ideology and the wider Dutch transatlantic slave trade it sustained. In this vein, terms and descriptions used to describe reality conceptualised in Dutch and western historiography at large as objective are problematised due to both their insufficient “empirical basis” and function as means with which to legitimate exploitative social relations. 1 Although not restricted to documentation produced in view of recording, facilitating, and narrating the trade in humans, the majority of sources drawn upon are taken from the archive of the Middelburgse Commercie Compagnie (MCC) – the most prolific Dutch private slave trading company of the Free Trade era (1730-1802). Specifically, five MCC sets of instructions, ten letters and five types of documents produced onboard the slave ship – the journal, surgeon’s journal, negotiation book, logbook, and report – pertaining to four separate voyages are directly referenced.
