This book has attempted to chart the erratic ideological terrain of abolitionism through the lens of white-produced theater in the Netherlands around 1800. An extensive set of tropes, linguistic variations, staging practices, illustrations, choreographies, characters, and plotlines worked on a dramatic realm of abolition that hoped to mobilize audiences for a crusade against the institutions of the slave trade and slavery. However, this theatrical discourse of reform was less univocal than its surface suggests. I have focused attention on the coding of three recurring stage templates—captive Africans and Asians as objects of pity, forbearing fools, and vengeful rebels—to explore how they related to interests other than what dramatists primarily had in mind. The “counterpoints” and tensions identified in the antislavery repertoire resulted from the convergence of a genuine abolitionist impulse with the enduring imperialist frame wherein authors, thespians, and audiences operated.

Fundamentally, what Repertoires of Slavery has shown is that the critical scenarios of slavery broadcast to Dutch reading and theatergoing audiences were deeply imbued with competing discourses of profitability, race, and the claim to human rights. A virtual consensus emerges in the abolitionist repertoire that slavery violated Christian and bourgeois values of compassion and familial love, and incited revolutionary notions of freedom, equality, and autonomy—even if the system in Asia was falsely depicted as small-scale and domestic compared to the plantation economy of the Caribbean, it remained clear that slavery in the VOC territories was equally dehumanizing and in violation of principles of liberty and integrity. The blackface characters that populated the stage of 1800 testified to the coffle, repeated abuse, and the cruel separation from their loved ones, thus cogently expressing the imperative necessity for humanitarian reform. The same repertoire, however, emanates the belief that the plantation economy could not be abandoned because it contributed so much to the metropole’s prowess. Simultaneously, it attests to the damaging ideas on race offered by philosophers and anatomists who connected physical appearance to intellect, morality, and worth and propagated white Europeans’ complete superiority and centrality vis-à-vis others. No sooner are Ada (in De negers) and Cery (in Stedman) manumitted, for instance, than they gratefully offer their eternal services in exchange for paternalist protection.