Daughters of the Trade: Atlantic Slavers and Interracial Marriage on the Gold Coast

by Pernille Ipsen

Severine Brock's first language was Ga, yet it was not surprising when, in 1842, she married Edward Carstensen. He was the last governor of Christiansborg, the fort that, in the eighteenth century, had been the center of Danish slave trading in West Africa. She was the descendant of Ga-speaking women who had married Danish merchants and traders. Their marriage would have been familiar to Gold Coast traders going back nearly 150 years. In Daughters of the Trade, Pernille Ipsen follows five generations of marriages between African women and Danish men, revealing how interracial marriage created a Euro-African hybrid culture specifically adapted to the Atlantic slave trade.

Although interracial marriage was prohibited in European colonies throughout the Atlantic world, in Gold Coast slave-trading towns it became a recognized and respected custom. Cassare, or "keeping house," gave European men the support of African women and their kin, which was essential for their survival and success, while African families made alliances with European traders and secured the legitimacy of their offspring by making the unions official.

For many years, Euro-African families lived in close proximity to the violence of the slave trade. Sheltered by their Danish names and connections, they grew wealthy and influential. But their powerful position on the Gold Coast did not extend to the broader Atlantic world, where the link between blackness and slavery grew stronger, and where Euro-African descent did not guarantee privilege. By the time Severine Brock married Edward Carstensen, their world had changed. Daughters of the Trade uncovers the vital role interracial marriage played in the coastal slave trade, the production of racial difference, and the increasing stratification of the early modern Atlantic world.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Africa, Ghana

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 20, 2015

About the author

Pernille Ipsen was professor of gender and women’s studies and history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for fifteen years and is now a full-time writer. She divides her time between Madison and Copenhagen, Denmark

Reviews

[Petra X]

I had read in The Hungry Empire: How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World of white British men marrying powerful Black women in Africa in order to facilitate the slave trade in which the women were already involved. This showed that the whites were not actually racist, since their wives and children would be black/mixed, which makes slavery even worse, and that just as on the island I live on, doing business is a lot easier if you are married to a local.

The trade greatly increased because of White demand but had been going on forever, and still, in Mauritania, Niger, Mali, Chad and Sudan. there is traditional, heredity-based slavery ie. people born of slave parents are slaves, property with no papers, and no chance at all of self-determination.

In the Caribbean it is the Bob Marley version of history that is taught, "Stolen from Africa", when of course, the slaves were captured by other Black people and sold to Whites. There is never any mention that Black people actually captured and sold slaves, (See Zora Neale Hurson's Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" an extended interview with the last slave, captured and sold in Africa at 19, and freed 5 years later, photographs included). If it is brought up in class, they only did it because White people wanted to buy them. The racism is so endemic and so much part of the culture that facts are totally ignored if they don't fit the narrative (I think all versions of history in every country do this). This does not mean that all West Indians are racist, very far from it!

So when I read about this book I was very interested.

[. · Rating 1 out of 5]

0.5 Stars

This book gave me the same feeling as When Women Invented Television.
By which I mean that the title is great and yet it has absolutely nothing to do with the content of the book. I realized in the introduction that I would not like this book and here is why Ipsen's book was pure speculation. The amount of times I read a sentence from her where she said "they probably felt" or something of that sort and wondered how'd she even come to that conclusion was too many to count. She basically had her own assumption and picked and chose what letters or random reference would go with it. Like it also reminded me of my thoughts on The Trouble with White Women. because the Euro-African (which is a phrasing I hate)/African women just being there aren't lending proof to her assumption of the introduction. HOW did the women help? In what ways did marriage bring the fort and Osu together, because from what I saw they could have traded without the marriages. (Never mind the fact that the "trade" is slaves, which she barely scratches the surface of.) There were a few points where the book threatened to get interesting (there's a section where one of the husband's is incarcerated or something and the wife basically got some people together and attempted to siege the fort, but those sections were few and far between. All together just uninteresting and frustrating because of the title and the subject matter would be fascinating in somebody else's hands.

[Ben Ricketts · Rating 4 out of 5]

At times, this book can be repetitious and a little dry, but what else do you expect from such an intensely researched historical source?

This is a great book for understanding some of the more complicated social and cultural intersections present in the Atlantic slave trade. I recommend it!

[Rebecca Malzer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely loved this book! I read it for my Families in the Atlantic World Colloquium. Looking at the slave trade from the view of the Danes who are often left out of the colonial narrative is incredibly interesting. This book is very digestible in terms of understanding the content.

[Eskil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jeg så en anmeldelse av boka i et svensk historisk tidsskrift, og ble svært glad for å finne den til en svært billig penge i ebokformat.

Ipsen gjør en god jobb med å bringe fram enkeltindivider som mest sannsynlig ikke ville fått noen plass i andre historiske verk på en måte som gjør at de blir mennesker og ikke bare karakterer. Dette gjør at hun veldig effektivt kan illustrere forholdene de lever under og hvordan disse endrer seg over drøye to hundre år. Dette er nok takket være alle primærkildene hun har brukt, og jeg grøsser ved tanken på hvor mange hundre timer hun må ha brukt på å lese og ta notater.

Boka går kronologisk, og dette tjener den godt på strukturmessig, men det skjedde i blant at jeg mista fokuset og det ble litt tregt. Dette er nok heller fordi det er en sakprosabok enn at hun er en dårlig forfatter, men det er aldri godt å si. Likevel er det ikke en særlig tung bok, så at det tok meg fem dager å lese den sier kanskje noe.

[Shelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

A history of cassare marriages in Christiansborg.