The 1651 promise of the States General to redeem slaves collectively, yet not to finance the procedure through state funds, prompted the Dutch Reformed Church to raise a basic question: who should assume responsibility for financing the redemption of slaves? The large number of captives taken after 1648 required an efficient organization and coordination of redemption efforts. The regents acknowledged that only the Dutch state authorities could collect enough money to ransom captives en masse. To keep its promise, the States General first collected money for this purpose in 1651, staged a general collection in 1663, and, urged on by Nicolaes Witsen, the mayor of Amsterdam, launched a third initiative in 1681. Witsen contended that if the Dutch ransomed all their captives at one stroke, it might soften the impact of corsairing on Dutch merchant fleets. He strongly believed that general collections were necessary “in the interests of the state.” Thus, after the mid-seventeenth century, the States General began to assemble funds and organize the release of captives, reluctantly taking financial responsibility for redemption.

The involvement of the States General in redeeming slaves was part of a larger trend. In the second half of the seventeenth century, other governments in Christian Europe and the Islamic West also became more dedicated to redemption, which process contributed greatly to state formation. In Morocco, the Alawite ruler Mulay Ismaʾil liberated Muslim captives held in Europe to cement his leadership as just, righteous, and unifying. In France, Louis XIV liberated Catholic captives as a tool to define Catholics, not Protestants, as true French citizens worthy of redemption. The refusal of Charles I to redistribute ransom money to liberate poor captives allowed the English Parliament to play a crucial role in redemptive affairs and strengthen its position vis-à-vis the Stuart monarchy at the onset of the English Civil War. In the Baltic, state governments required all seafarers to buy into the Sklavenkasse (see also chapter 4), an insurance against the risk of captivity. The Sklavenkasse became a form of social insurance that consequently strengthened the bond between subjects and their respective governments in Hamburg, Lübeck, Denmark, and Sweden. In the Nordic sovereignties, the liberation of captives provided the body politic with an argument for enhancing its image as an institution that took care of its subjects.