My argument in my book is that except for the slave revolt in Haiti, slave revolts did not contribute to slave liberation, but the decision to end it… - Piet Emmer

You also have to realise that they would not have been free either if they had stayed in Africa. They had already been enslaved.

There is also emotional literature about the occupation period. That war was not cheerful in the Netherlands, but in my school days, everything was so wonderfully exaggerated, especially the role of the resistance. The facts were pushed aside and if that had continued, we would never have come to any new insights. If we had been blinded by Anne Frank, we would never have discovered that the Netherlands did not play a heroic role at all during that time.

One of the things that is constantly questioned is profitability. The thinking is mostly: the slave trade is so strange, you only drive it if you earn a lot from it. While, for example, an awful lot of slaves already died of infectious diseases while travelling across the Atlantic. I calculated that the Dutch slave trade was only an estimated 0.005 per cent of national income. So that is not much. Moreover, the Dutch slave trade is the only one that ceased to exist for economic reasons.