Two Dates, Half a Century Apart
Dutch abolition happened in two widely separated stages, and confusing them is a common error. In 1814, in the settlement that followed the Napoleonic wars and under considerable British pressure, the Netherlands prohibited its subjects from taking part in the transatlantic slave trade. Trading in people was now a crime; owning them was not. Slavery itself remained lawful in the Dutch colonies for another forty-nine years, and was abolished only on 1 July 1863, in Suriname and the Caribbean islands, with a further period of compulsory labour imposed on the freed population of Suriname.
The Gold Coast posts sat awkwardly between these two dates. They had never been plantation colonies; they were trading stations whose principal export, for well over a century, had been human beings shipped to the Americas. After 1814 that export was illegal for Dutch ships. The forts remained, the officials remained, and the question of what they were now for had no good answer.
The Search for Legitimate Commerce
The response was the same across the West African coast: a turn to what British writers called legitimate commerce. Gold had always been the original attraction and continued to be traded, particularly through the western posts at Axim and in the Nzema country. Palm oil became the great growth commodity of the nineteenth century, driven by European demand for industrial lubricants, soap and candles. Timber, ivory, gum and grain moved in smaller quantities.
There were also attempts at production rather than purchase. Dutch officials experimented with plantation agriculture in the districts around Elmina, trying coffee, cotton and other crops. These schemes consumed money and produced very little. They failed for reasons that recurred all along the coast: no secure supply of labour on acceptable terms, no local landholding system that permitted large European estates, high mortality among European managers, and competition from established producers elsewhere.
The commercial results were disappointing enough that the Dutch Gold Coast never again paid for itself. The accounts that eventually persuaded The Hague to withdraw in 1871 were the accounts of an establishment that had lost its business half a century earlier and never replaced it.
What Abolition Did Not Change
It is important to be precise about the limits of what 1814 achieved. It ended Dutch participation in shipping captives across the Atlantic. It did not end slavery in West Africa, which was an institution of long standing in coastal and inland societies alike, including in Asante, and which continued regardless of European legislation.
Nor did it immediately end unfree labour in the Dutch establishments themselves. The forts had long relied on enslaved and pawned workers for construction, transport and domestic service, and these arrangements did not vanish with a decree issued in Europe. The practical position on the coast changed considerably more slowly than the legal position in The Hague, and the surviving records are more candid about the discrepancy than one might expect.
The Uncomfortable Overlap
The most awkward feature of the period is a matter of dates. The recruitment of West African men at Elmina for the colonial army in the East Indies began in 1831 and continued until 1872 — that is, entirely within the era in which the slave trade was prohibited to Dutch subjects.
Recruits were formally enlisted volunteers. In practice a payment was frequently made to whoever controlled an unfree man, who was then declared free at the point of enlistment and required to work off the sum as an advance against his pay. Whether this constituted a purchase in substance was disputed at the time and remains disputed among historians. What is not in dispute is that a state which had outlawed the slave trade was, in the same decades, paying money at Elmina to obtain men and shipping them across an ocean.
Assessing the Period
Two things can be true at once. Dutch abolition was a genuine legal rupture that ended a trade in which the Netherlands had been a major participant for two centuries, and it was accompanied by evasions, delays and arrangements designed to preserve access to labour under other names.
For the Gold Coast the consequence was decline. Without the Atlantic trade the forts had no economic purpose that could be made to pay, and the search for a replacement failed. The Netherlands stayed on for another half-century largely out of habit, prestige and the recruitment agreement — and when even those reasons ran out, it left.
