Britain eyes a slavery apology. The Dutch backlash is the warning

Britain is inching toward its first formal state apology for slavery. Andy Burnham has pledged to seek a “structured dialogue” with former colonies to help shape it, according to The Guardian — while Westminster firmly rules out backing reparations. The royal family, whose customary “profound personal sorrow” stops short of an apology, repeated the formula this week through King Charles. It is a first, tentative step down a road the Netherlands started walking five years ago.

The Dutch arrived there in stages. On 1 July 2021, Amsterdam mayor Femke Halsema broke ranks during the annual Keti Koti commemorations and apologised on the city's behalf, calling its role “direct, worldwide, large-scale, multifaceted and protracted”. Rotterdam, Utrecht, The Hague and the Dutch central bank followed. Then, in December 2022, prime minister Mark Rutte called slavery a “crime against humanity” and apologised on behalf of the state. Six months later, King Willem-Alexander asked forgiveness in Amsterdam's Oosterpark, saying he felt “the weight of the words” in his heart and soul.

The words landed badly for many. Activists and descendants slammed Rutte's apology as hasty, paternalistic and made without real consultation — Roy Kaikusi Groenberg of the Honour and Recovery Foundation branded it a “neocolonial belch”. Caribbean intellectuals pointed out the irony of European politicians dictating the terms and timing of reconciliation. The public was split too: Ipsos I&O's Sjoerd van Heck said support for a national apology sat at 31% in 2021 against 55% opposed, drifting to 40% for and 46% against afterwards. Geert Wilders, who has long mocked state apologies, rode that mood to a shock election win in 2023.

The Dutch state ruled out direct financial reparations to individuals or former colonies. Instead it attached €200m to the apology — split between state-led education, curriculum overhauls, historical research and colonial heritage work, plus community grants — and an initial commitment to a National Slavery Museum. That museum, backed by €80m from Amsterdam city hall and the national government, is due to open in 2030.

The scale of what is being reckoned with is enormous. Dutch Golden Age merchants trafficked an estimated 600,000 enslaved Africans across the Atlantic to plantations in Suriname and Curaçao, and between 660,000 and 1 million more across the Indian Ocean and East Indies. By the 1770s, slavery-derived wealth made up more than 10% of the GDP of the province of Holland. The crown itself made roughly €545m in modern money from the trade between 1675 and 1770 alone. The Netherlands legally abolished slavery in Suriname and the Dutch Caribbean on 1 July 1863 — later than Britain and France — but real freedom only came in 1873.

Linda Nooitmeer, former chair of the National Institute for the Study of Dutch Slavery and its Legacy and now head of the grassroots group Deeeni, warned that apologies risk becoming the “mirrors and crystals of the 21st century” — the symbolic trinkets once used to buy and sell enslaved people. “Slavery was an economic system,” she said. “If you say all this was wrong, when are you ready to talk about the economic side?” For her, the missing ingredient was community ownership: as long as descendants are shut out of decision-making, “the old mechanisms of inequality simply remain”. The lesson for Britain, The Guardian reports, is that an apology may not close the book on colonial history so much as open a contested new chapter of reckoning.