Esther Captain (1969) is a historian and senior researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in Leiden. She is a member of the committee overseeing independent research into the role of the House of Orange-Nassau in Dutch colonial history and an author/editor on this research team. She is specialized in late colonial Indonesia, the Indonesian revolution, and postcolonial Netherlands in relation to the Dutch Caribbean islands, Indonesia and Suriname.