The Right to Freedom. Enslaved Sailors, Civic Patriarchs, and the Question of Redemption in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic

The redemption of Dutch slaves from seventeenth-century Mediterranean bondage reveals that human rights as a tacit social contract predated the revolutionary era. Local magistrates and church elders were key in enforcing captives’ rights to freedom as their political participation and capital allowed them to assist families in the jurisdictional, financial, and logistic aspects of redemption. At the national level, regents also endorsed the rights of captives by reluctantly signing international treaties to ransom them. This article concludes that political participation was necessary to make rights work, but also that this relationship could be fraudulent and complex.