A new exhibition illuminates the history of Dutch slavery

IN 1881 SOMEONE donated an antique brass circlet to the Rijksmuseum, the Dutch national museum of art and history. The object (pictured) is a bit of a stumper. Engraved with a heraldic shield and the year 1689, it bears no indication of what purpose it served. The museum staff listed it as a dog collar.

They could have investigated more thoroughly. Scattered through the Rijksmuseum’s collection are paintings showing similar collars worn not by dogs, but by young black men. Referred to as “Moors”, they were routinely kept as servants in wealthy 17th-century Dutch households, a sideline of the vast European human-trafficking operation that carried millions of enslaved Africans to the Americas.

Slavery was not a distant memory in 1881. On some Dutch colonial plantations it had ended just a decade earlier. Yet a curator at the Rijksmuseum apparently failed to make the connection. Had Dutch society really forgotten such objects? Or was it trying not to see them?

The collar is on display in the museum’s new exhibition on the history of enslavement in the Netherlands and its former colonies. (King Willem-Alexander opened the exhibition in May, but the museum remains closed until June 5th due to covid-19 restrictions.) It is part of a broad movement to re-examine the country’s colonial past. The Netherlands ruled...