Post #1387684

@Mabande I am Dutch by birth, so I should know those things. The Republic of the Seven United Netherlands was the superpower of the day: Hugo de Groot basically invented international law, the law of nations. Like other great inventions like the telescope, the microscope, determining the size of the Earth by triangulation, and the first usable pendulum clock. But the country was itself a cruel practitioner of slavery. The VOC, the Dutch East India Company - the first joint stock company ever, I am told - 'owned' the island of Java, with all the people on it, and exploited them just as ruthlessly as American slave owners. They even had their own army there. The Netherlands, and the Amsterdam merchants holding the VOC's shares, prospered largely due to this. I am a descendant of this Calvinist ruling class, and some of my ancestors may well have owned slaves in this way - not individually, but through the VOC, out of sight overseas. Things didn't get better until the 19th century, after the VOC had gone bankrupt - like Trump's casinos - and the Dutch state, now a monarchy, had taken over. A small colonial civil servant called Eduard Douwes Dekker saw the injustice and started writing about it, resulting in a Dutch literary classic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cm0uV-oOIbc