What did enslaved people do to gain citizenship rights and what determined their success? By analyzing and linking different archival collections, the project ‘How slaves became citizens: Proto-citizenship, empowerment, and inequality in the Age of Emancipation, 1770-1930’, investigates how people in Dutch colonies emancipated over several generations and developed an informal form of citizenship.

We aim to investigate the emergence of this proto-citizenship during slavery and the ways it changed after abolition of slavery. This allows us to better understand why some societies were more successful than others to develop equal citizenship after the abolition of slavery.