Rethinking the History of Reparations for Historical Injustices: An Early Modern Perspective

Abstract

This article aims to rethink the origins and discontinuities within the history of reparations for historical injustices. It does so by exploring the case of the 1654 reparations made by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) to the heirs of the English victims of the 1623 Amboyna trial. In particular, the article analyzes in what settings—and how—modes of remembering and representing past suffering merged with legal reasoning in concrete claim-making practices. It situates the reparations ordered by the binational arbitration committee established by the 1654 Westminster Peace Treaty within three principal contexts: early modern memory practices, a legal language of reparations, and peace treaty making and arbitration. Accordingly, the article uncovers the logics governing early modern historical reparations and reconsiders what this means for our understanding of the differences and similarities between modern and early modern reparations. It shows that reparations in the early modern period were concerned with the rehabilitation of the honor and status of the victims rather than with regret and atonement in the form of apologies. They functioned, second, as exceptions to imperatives of forgetting, not as materialization of gestures of atonement. Finally, as early modern reparations habitually entered the realm of international politics and diplomacy they became subject to political conflict. In contrast to modern historical reparations, however, they did not take the form of “reparations politics” aimed at the emancipation of historically disadvantaged groups. The article, accordingly, seeks to begin a much-needed dialogue between scholars of modern and early modern reparations.