In 2001 the Dutch government, through Minister Rogier van Boxtel, recognized that the Netherlands has committed “great injustice” in the past and offered “intense excuses for the enslavement of people and trading in enslaved people”. During the abolition of slavery it were not the victims but the perpetrators of this crime who received financial compensation. In another crime against humanity – the Holocaust – the victims are compensated. West Germany and Israel have signed a Reparation Agreement in 1952 in which they agreed the Germans pay compensation for the persecution of Jews, slave labor in the concentration camps and the property stolen from the Jews. It is a sum of DM 120 billion.
The core of this study is to provide insight into the nature and extent of the economic aspects of colonialism in Suriname. Economist Armand Zunder has spent four years in various archives to gather the data for the calculation of the amount of reparations. At the same time he introduces an entirely new approach to the Surinamese history and shows which interest groups have largely benefited in the Netherlands from colonialism. This study flips the scripts on the historiography of Suriname and offers many new viewpoints that have been hidden so far by the studies that defend colonialism to varying degrees . This book is only available in Dutch.