ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the legal arguments that Dutch contemporaries used to legitimise both slavery and the slave trade in the 1760s and 1770s. By using the concept of sociocultural imaginary, which refers to the broad way in which contemporaries perceived their social existence, it demonstrates how legal arguments pertaining to slavery and the slave trade were used to create and reproduce social hierarchies, in which the enslaved population was marked as both moveable property and as the recipient of benevolence. The writings of three Calvinist authors – David Gallandat, Thomas Pistorius, and Jan Jacob Hartsinck – demonstrate that contemporaries reacted to seventeenth-century Calvinist denunciations of the slave trade, resistance of enslaved Africans, and antislavery ideas by articulating legal arguments that legitimised slavery. These pro-slavery arguments gave particular emphasis to the importance of social hierarchies in overseas territories. The sociocultural imagination of Gallandat, Pistorius, and Hartsinck sheds light on their own motivations, which legitimised a violent institution instrumental to the Dutch Empire. This chapter points to the lack of imagination and the absence of non-white voices – i.e., the ‘white innocence’ at the heart of these visions on enslaved populations and slavery.
