During Denmark’s presence on the West African coast (from, roughly, 1658-1850), several close relationships were established between Danish men and local (mostly) Ga women. These cross-cultural and interracial relationships received almost no attention from historians until 2008, when Pernille Ipsen defended her Ph.D. dissertation from Copenhagen University on the subject. A revised version of Ipsen’s dissertation, Daughters of the Trade: Atlantic Slavers and Interracial Marriage on the Gold Coast is an important contribution that will appeal to a broad audience of scholars who have an interest in the history of entanglements, Africa, Europe, the Atlantic, gender, power relations, race and society.
Ipsen examines, through the lens of marriages, the complex and hybrid constructions of European and African identities in the Atlantic world. The author explores several case studies that illuminate the intersection of European and African social structures, in particular how both groups intermingled and created a unique social world that lasted for over 200 years. Ipsen shows how marriages between Danish officials and African women marked the beginning of a social process that began in the early years of the Danish presence on the coast. They did not constitute a uniquely Danish practice but were, in fact, common in zones of contact between Europeans and Africans. This process would gradually create hybrid family structures, which Ipsen calls “Euro-African” families. The construction of these families played a key role in coastal socio-economic structures but also in political frameworks. Ipsen’s research on the importance of these rarely studied marriages (or cassares as they were called) fills an important gap in current historiography.
Ipsen balances her analysis well between existing literature, theory and primary sources. The latter is especially important considering the context and the scarcity of the sources. Ipsen therefore provides the reader with a thorough and critical discussion of the benefits and challenges of her material. For example, she discusses the difficulty of analysing female agency due to the scarcity of information on women in the official documents of the Danes in Africa. Ipsen’s cases often represent the upper echelon of coastal society and therefore cannot necessarily provide a complete overview of the entire coastal world. Nevertheless, The strength in Ipsen’s book is that it manages to build both a narrative of the social reality of the Gold Coast as well as an analysis of gender construction and changes in the patterns of power relations between the Europeans and Africans during the course of two centuries.
Ipsen reveals that in the beginning of the Danish presence in West Africa cassare marriages had both an economic and social function. For Europeans marrying into African families, such marriages helped them to gain access to important local trading circuits on the West African coast but they also simply helped them to better settle in Africa. The cassares were not only advantageous to Europeans. They also provided the social elite of African coastal societies the opportunity to develop close ties to the European traders. The dynamics of these social and economic functions changed over time. The advantages of developing close social ties for both groups were initially based on trade with each other. But the dwindling of the Atlantic slave trade in the nineteenth century complicated the lives of Euro-African families by increasingly threatening European traders’ primary source of income and their main reason for remaining on the coast.
At the core of the book lies the juxtaposition of local practices and how the perception of the role of these marriages changed from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Many of the Danish men led a so-called double life since back in Europe their African lives were largely unknown. Ipsen analyses the ambiguous ways in which they viewed their African families. For example, Danish officials often described their African wives with a certain amount of emotional distance and even frequent racial and biological observations. Yet at the same time they also clearly cared and provided for their wives and children, even building houses in adjacent towns to the Danish forts and seeing to it that their children went to Danish schools inside the forts. Ipsen also delves into topics such as spouses’ feelings for each other and their perceptions of emotions. The book is clearly the result of careful source reading and contextualization of topics such as gender, power and racisms.
Although the book focuses only on the Danish-African connection, it will prove useful to other scholars of the European presence in West Africa. It provides a good analysis of cassares, which were common among other Europeans on the coast. She also positions her work well within the history of not only Euro-African relations but also of colonialism and entanglement. Ipsen’s many examples help the reader to better understand the construction of Euro-African relations during the early modern period. The book also contains thorough footnotes, which add interesting information to the text. In fact, some of the information in the footnotes could have been easily incorporated into the main body of the text.
This book is a relevant piece of research that will surely have an impact on the social history of the Atlantic. Ipsen’s work offers a broad conceptual toolkit for other historians to study the social relations between people crossing states, religion, nations and cultural borders. It is a book that will be useful to experienced readers of Atlantic history but could also be assigned in university courses that deal with social history, African history and Atlantic history.
