New Publication: Race, Slavery, and the Market
Justina Antoine in Copenhagen with the two children whose nanny she was (1857), courtesy of the Danish National Gallery.
IN THE SAME SEA PI Gunvor Simonsen has published a chapter in The European Experience in Slavery, 1650–1850 (DeGruyter, 2024).
In this essay, Gunvor Simonsen zooms in on how race, slavery, and commerce shaped life for Africans and African Caribbean people in Copenhagen, the capital of the Danish-Norwegian dual monarchy, in the eighteenth century. During this period, Copenhagen, the financial center of the Danish colonial empire, saw the emergence of a vernacular of race. Racial ideas came to Copenhagen as detailed news from the wider Atlantic was published in the city’s relatively small press; they were made available to Copenhageners in a limited number of travel accounts and circulated in the households of absentee planters, colonial officers, merchants, and noblemen and -women with money and prestige invested in colonial ventures. This vernacular came to shape the slave trading and enslavement that began to appear in Copenhagen at the very same time as race emerged with force as a topic in the capital’s newspapers.
You can read the chapter here.