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Captain, Dr. Esther
Dr. Esther Captain is a historian and senior researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in Leiden, the Netherlands. Her work focuses on the intergenerational transfer of slavery, postcolonial and post-WW II memories and the issue of healing. Currently, she is a member of the committee doing research The House of Orange-Nassau and Colonial History, instigated by King Willem Alexander. She was a member of the commission on the involvement of the Dutch state in colonial slavery, which resulted in the book Staat en slavernij (2023)/Slavery and the Dutch state (forthcoming 2025). Previously, she has been a project leader at the research program ‘Independence, Decolonization, Violence and War in Indonesia, 1945-1950’, resulting in the book Het geluid van geweld (2022)/Resonances of violence (forthcoming 2025).
Esther Captain has been employed as Head of the Centre for Applied Research in Education at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, head of research at the National Committee for 4 and 5 May and as a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University and the University of Amsterdam. She also worked as a project manager of Indo-European Heritage within the Heritage of the War-program at the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sports. Captain has been a visiting fellow at Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis of Rutgers University (USA) and a participant in the National Endowment of the Humanities workshop “History and Commemoration: Legacies of the Pacific War” at the East-West Center and the University of Hawaii.
Selected Publications
With Rose-Mary Allen, Matthias van Rossum and Urwin Vyent (editors), State and slavery: Dutch colonial slavery and its afterlives. Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2025.
With Onno Sinke, Resonances of violence: Bersiap and the dynamics of violence in the first phase of the Indonesian revolution, 1945-1946. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2025.
With Rose-Mary Allen, Matthias van Rossum and Urwin Vyent, Dutch colonial slavery and its afterlives: Research agenda 2025-2035. Leiden: KITLV, 2024.
With Onno Sinke, ‘“Hatred of foreign elements and their accomplishes”: Extreme violence in the first phase of the Indonesian Revolution (17 August 1945 to 31 March 1946)’ in: Gert Oostindie et al (eds.), Beyond the pale. Dutch extreme violence in the Indonesian war of independence, 1945-1949, pp. 140-175. Amsterdam: AUP, 2022.
‘Finding a home in Rotterdam. Colonial and postcolonial migrants to and from Maasstad’ in: Gert Oostindie (ed.), Colonialism and slavery: An alternative history of the port city of Rotterdam, pp.202-221. Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2021.
‘Sexual restraint, substitution, transgression and extreme sexual violence across the late-colonial and postcolonial Indonesia’, in: Dagmar Herzog and Chelsea Shields (eds.), The Routledge companion to sexuality and colonialism, pp. 353-363. New York/London: Routledge, 2021.
With Guno Jones, ‘Inversing dependence. The Dutch Antilles, Surinam and the desperate Netherlands during World War II’, in: Debbie McCollin and Karen Eccles (eds.), World War II and the West Indies, pp. 71-91. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2017.
‘The selective forgetting and remodeling of the past. Postcolonial legacies in the Netherlands’, in: Stefan Jonsson and Julia Willén (eds.), Austere histories in European societies: Social exclusion and the contest of colonial memories, pp. 59-73. London: Routledge, 2017.
‘Harmless identities. Representations of racial consciousness among three generations Indo-Europeans’, in: Philomena Essed and Isabel Hoving (eds.), Dutch racism, pp. 53-69. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014.
With Guno Jones, Oorlogserfgoed overzee. De erfenis van de Tweede Wereldoorlog in Aruba, Curaçao, Indonesië en Suriname. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2010.
