GERT J. OOSTINDIE Squaring the circle Commemorating the VOC after 400 years In 2002, the Netherlands ‘celebrated’ the establishment, exactly four centu- ries before, of the Dutch Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC, East Indies Company). By pure coincidence, that same year a national monument in commemoration of the Atlantic slave trade and Dutch Caribbean slavery – in which the Dutch West Indische Compagnie (WIC, West Indies Company) was a key player – was inaugurated in Amsterdam. In both the celebration of the Dutch East Indies Company and the act of repentance regarding its West Indies counterpart, Queen Beatrix and the then Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok were conspicuously present. 1 GERT J. OOSTINDIE is director of the KITLV in Leiden and Professor of Caribbean Studies at Utrecht University. His research interests are history (particularly slavery and decolonization), international relations, and ethnicity. He published some twenty books in the Caribbean and Latin American Studies. His most recent English-language books are (with Inge Klinkers), Decolonising the Caribbean; Dutch policies in a comparative perspective, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003, and the edited volume Facing up to the past; Perspectives on the commemoration of slavery from Africa, the Americas and Europe, Kingston: Randle/The Hague: Prince Claus Fund, 2001. 1 The official dates were 20 March and 1 July, respectively. This article was first presented in November 2002 as a paper at the Erasmushuis in Jakarta and for the Lembaga Adat/ Kebudayaan Toar Lumimuut Masyarakat Minahasa in Tondano. I owe thanks to the audiences at these occasions for their reactions, to the anonymous readers for the Bijdragen and to several colleagues who commented on a draft of this article: Taufik Abdullah, Sander Adelaar, Michiel Baud, Vincent Houben, Adrian B. Lapian, Remco Raben, Merle Ricklefs, Leslie Witz and, at KITLV, David Henley, Gerrit Knaap, Harry Poeze, Henk Schulte Nordholt, and Roger Tol. Enriq Hessing and Laura van Deelen of the Stichting Viering 400 jaar VOC kindly shared their criticism on this paper with me; we agreed to disagree on interpretation. After completing and circulating my first draft, I was presented with two other Dutch pieces on the VOC celebrations reflecting more or less the same concerns and criticism: Raben (2002) and Van Stipriaan and Bal (2002). There is a remarkable consensus in these papers and mine, perhaps underlining that the points made here are all too obvious. A very nuanced analysis of Dutch and Indonesian interpretations is provided by Lapian (2002). Peter Rietbergen (2002) provides a different perspective. Weary of ‘political correctness’ and a presumed widespread Dutch feeling of guilt about the colonial past, he rightly defends Oostindie 135 23-01-2006 09:09:04