The survey of Repertoires of Slavery spans the decades between 1770 and 1810, a period marked by fundamental political, economic, and ideological change on a global scale. In the Netherlands, these decades generated a recession of the (colonial) economy, the consolidation of bourgeois mentality, and severe political unrest. All of these issues were abundantly discussed in and shaped by Dutch culture which was in itself increasingly politicized. This first chapter will delve into the contexts in which the repertoire was produced, performed, and consumed in order to allow for a better understanding of the analyses in the following three chapters. It first sketches a nonexhaustive overview of how the Dutch, through private and public investors, entered human trafficking and the slavery-based trade in the Atlantic and Asian orbits in the early seventeenth century and continued to benefit from them throughout the eighteenth century. The chapter goes on to describe the Dutch revolutionary period at the turn of the nineteenth century and to examine how it impacted the course of colonial management and slavery politics. The third section then concisely outlines the development and nature of Dutch abolitionist sentiment and slave-led resistance in the overseas territories. A final section turns to the ways in which theatrical culture of the Netherlands in 1800 offered an environment in which a broad audience learned about domestic and colonial affairs through a variety of dramatic genres and looks at how the institution of theater was intrinsically connected to municipal, national, and imperial politics.