The Future of The Past — Reflections on the Netherlands’ History and Heritage of Slavery
A reprinted modern classic of enduring relevance
Waldo Heilbron was one of the most important proponents for the decolonisation of the Netherlands’ history of slavery. His pioneering final book remains an essential intervention in the national thinking about colonialism’s ongoing legacy. And while much has changed in the conversation about slavery in the Netherlands and beyond, there remains much work to be done.
Originally published in 2006, The Future of the Past links the Netherlands’ history of slavery with modern racial attitudes through what Heilbron calls slavery’s mental heritage. To break this continuity, we must challenge the eighteenth-century frame informing our interpretation of the past. Rather than reproduce the perspective of the coloniser, we must reinterpret historical documents, allow for new research techniques, search for what has been forgotten, to uncover the silenced past in Black perspectives.
In four connected essays, Heilbron provides a framework for this research direction. Building on ideas like identity, heritage and the invention of race, he demonstrates how a skewed version of history, as reproduced in schools and museums, produces a sense of superiority and inferiority in white and Black people. He challenges dominant approaches to ‘uncovering’ historical truth for silencing the experiential worlds of enslaved people. Examining colonial and Marron forts in Suriname, he demonstrates how the decision to commemorate certain places while forgetting others cannot be separated from our view of the past. Finally he argues for interdisciplinary research to access marginalised perspectives, such as studying oral history and reading existing colonial documents for the multiple voices they contain. In doing so, we might give the past a new future.
An elegant meditation on power in historiography, urgently relevant then and now
With forewords by professor Gloria Wekker, anthropologist Mitchell Esajas and Miguel Heilbron, the author’s son
An early and important critique of the dominant national self-image
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“An influential book about [the] decolonisation of the Netherlands’ history of slavery.”
“The book is a bold intervention in the dominant narrative on history, culture and heritage within Dutch society, in which the colonisers’ heirs have selected, described and interpreted the “facts” of “history”, while the perspective of the enslaved and their ancestors has been systematically silenced.”
