Esther Captain is a historian and senior researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in Leiden. She is an expert on the postcolonial Netherlands in relation to the Dutch Caribbean islands, Indonesia, and Suriname. She contributed to books detailing the slavery history of The Hague (2022), Utrecht (2021), and Rotterdam (2020), and is co-author of Sporen van slavernij in Utrecht (2012). She also published Oorlogserfgoed overzee: De erfenis van de Tweede Wereldoorlog in Aruba, Curaçao, Indonesië en Suriname (2010). Additionally, she is a member of a newly formed committee that will research the role of the Dutch royal house in colonial and postcolonial history. She is chair of the Keti Koti Table Foundation, a Dutch platform aimed at creating constructive dialogues about the slavery past.