Professor Abe de Jong has received a grant of €838.000 from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) for a project titled “Collateral damage: The financial economics of slavery”.

The project focuses on the short and long-run effects of slavery in the Dutch Caribbean colonies. 150 years ago, slavery was abolished in the Dutch Caribbean colonies. Recently, there has been a growing awareness that many questions remain unanswered about how Dutch slavery worked and how it affected the enslaved and their descendants. De Jong’s project studies the financial economics behind slavery. The project examines whether finance contributed to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the number of people forcibly displaced. The project also considers whether the use of enslaved people as collateral stimulated additional investments in slavery and how financial instruments affected the lives of the enslaved and their descendants. De Jong and colleagues aim to answer these questions and thereby contribute to debates about the causes and effects of slavery.

The project continues joint research with lecturer Tim Kooijmans (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia) and Professor of Finance Peter Koudijs (New York University, US), who are also involved in the new research plans. The project will involve two PhD students, who will be supervised by De Jong and colleagues. De Jong, Professor of Corporate Finance at FEB’s Department of Economics, Econometrics and Finance, looks forward to working on the new project. “The financial economics of slavery has not been explored beyond individual cases of banks that were involved in the financing of the slave trade. We hope to expose the financial mechanisms behind the transport of enslaved workers to the Dutch colonies to work on sugar and coffee plantations.”

The NWO Open Competition

With the NWO Open Competition-SSH, NWO Social Sciences and Humanities wants to offer researchers the opportunity to carry out research into a subject of their own choosing without any thematic constraints. The aim is to facilitate excellent, non-programmed, curiosity-driven research that primarily addresses a social sciences or humanities research question and research problem.