Written in 1774, Nicolaas Simon van Winter’s Monzongo, of de koningklyke slaaf was the most popular antislavery production staged across the Netherlands until well into the nineteenth century. In a sentimental preface, van Winter attests that he created the tragedy in response to the nearly successful slave revolt in the Dutch colony of Berbice in 1763. He had been particularly shocked by the brutal ways in which the rebellion’s leaders were hanged, burnt alive, or tortured on the rack once the revolt was rooted out, and by the apathetic news coverage of the events in the Dutch metropole. With Monzongo, van Winter hoped “to show [his compatriots] the brutalities of slavery; let them hear the voice of humanity and natural law, and elicit sympathy.” Despite its explicit and stirring preface, however, Monzongo is not set in Berbice and does not address the excesses of the transatlantic slavery system. Instead, it stages an insurrection plotted by the enslaved king of Veragua (today’s Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama), Monzongo, against his Spanish oppressor in early-sixteenth-century Mexico.

There were good reasons for van Winter to opt for a distant episode of colonialism in preference to staging a direct critique of the wrongs in the Dutch Atlantic. First, van Winter himself was engaged in the slavery-based trade as a merchant and shareholder of the Amsterdam company Jacob Muhl & van Winter, which marketed Campeche wood and indigo from Honduras and Curaçao.