Spoils of Neutrality: The Austrian Netherlands in the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Early 1780s

This article examines the involvement of the Austrian Netherlands in the transatlantic slave trade of the early 1780s. It focuses on one actor in particular: Frederic Romberg (1729–1819), a Westphalian living in Brussels, who was primarily responsible for the Belgian slave trade. By allowing elites from Flanders to invest in individual slave voyages and thereby gaining political goodwill in Brussels, his Ghent-based firm Romberg & Consors was able to become the key actor in the slave trade under the Imperial flag. The company itself was a consortium of Romberg’s northern European network of business partners, most of them Huguenots or Calvinists. Romberg benefited as a shipowner and transport entrepreneur from Habsburg neutrality in the American War of Independence, but his engagement in the slave trade became not only a humanitarian but also a financial disaster. Yet despite constantly losing very substantial sums on his slaving voyages, Romberg intensified his engagement in the colonial trades after 1784, now operating from Bordeaux and buying plantations in St. Domingue. This economically nonsensical behavior demonstrates that investments in the slave trade and plantations were beyond the logic of profitability. They had a global and cosmopolitan allure that attracted Romberg and many of his contemporaries. By examining the mindset of a slave trader who gained popularity from his engagement in that trade, the article reveals why the 1780s were boom years for the slave trade even though its profitability was shrinking and its brutality was being highlighted to ever greater effect by the abolitionist campaign.