VIII - Making a Home in Rotterdam: Colonial and Postcolonial Migrants to and From the City

Summary

Various street names in the Rotterdam district of Schiemond refer to ships that were operated by the Koninklijke Rotterdamsche Lloyd shipping company: Indrapoera, Slamat, Japara, Dempo, Baloeran, Kedoe and Sibajak. Rotterdamsche Lloyd had in turn based those ships’ names on regions, mountains and volcanoes in Indonesia. These names qualify Schiemond as an ‘Indisch’ district, one moreover that was long bustling with industry: numerous port companies were based in this quarter from the mid-nineteenth century. In the 1960s, many of these companies relocated to the newer docks, whereupon the docks of Schiemond became superfluous. After years of high vacancy levels, the municipality of Rotterdam started redeveloping the area in the 1980s. The demolition of the old commercial premises freed up space for new homes in the form of public- sector rented accommodation. The street names in this district make you curious to learn more about the colonial and postcolonial connections between Rotterdam and the Indonesian archipelago. Who had contact with whom and why?

Rotterdam is a port city: people and goods departed from here bound for the Caribbean and Southeast Asia (and other places too, of course, but that is beyond the scope of this book). It is also a place of arrival, reception and transit, for both people and goods from overseas territories. The preceding chapters concentrated on Rotterdam as the point of departure. In this chapter, the focus is on the city as the point of arrival for people from the Caribbean and Southeast Asia. Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to arrive at a reliable estimate of the number of people who have come to the Netherlands, and specifically Rotterdam, from ‘the West’ and ‘the East’ since the seventeenth century. The registration of ships’ passengers was far from comprehensive in the past and many archives have been lost anyway. Nevertheless, there are sources that mention the presence of enslaved people, the formerly enslaved and free black people from the Caribbean in Rotterdam. There was plenty of traffic between Paramaribo in Suriname and Rotterdam (as was also the case for Middelburg and Amsterdam).