Portrait of Laurens Reael

In the early days of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), key administrators debated the deployment of enslaved people. Governor General Laurens Reael, for example, did not see slavery as a solution to the labour shortage. This was not based on moral grounds for, according to him, they would always try to flee, ‘because it is difficult to forget the pleasures of the country where one was born and raised.’