A Kingpin of Slave Plantations The Plantation Empire of Investment Banker Hermann Albrecht Insinger in the Danish and Dutch Atlantic, 1753-1863

This paper investigates the financialization of colonial plantation economies in the Dutch and Danish Atlantic by analysing the Amsterdam merchant house Insinger & Co. (1753–1863) across 52 plantations from a global micro history perspective. Highlighting the active participation of Central European actors as planters and private bankers, this study maps a clear taxonomy of capital extraction—from the Krause-Heyliger network on St. Croix to the structural defaults of the Linck and Cook portfolios in Suriname. It demonstrates how abstract financial innovations depended on scaling up violence on the plantation ground, treating enslaved populations as liquid assets. Ultimately, the paper demonstrates that the Emancipation Act of 1863 functioned as a massive, state-funded liquidity channel that successfully converted unpayable colonial debt into risk-free, state-guaranteed European capital, proving that the formal dismantling of human bondage did not mark an economic rupture or structural failure in Western capital accumulation. Rather, emancipation represented the final, highly lucrative financialization of slave labor—the moment where the broken bodies of the enslaved workforce were definitively liquidated into risk-free, state-guaranteed European capital.