Pernille Ipsen’s Daughters of the Trade is a rare study of marriage practices and experiences at the intersection of two oft-neglected spaces: the Danish Atlantic and Ga-speaking communities on the Gold Coast of West Africa. As Ipsen ably demonstrates, there is much to be learned from Dano–Ga society that can help us more broadly conceptualize the Atlantic and those who made their lives at its edges and across its waters.

Ipsen’s study focuses on casssare (interracial) marriages in the region surrounding the Danish fort at Christiansborg, within the confines of the Osu district in modern-day Accra. Her narrative extends from the beginning of the eighteenth century to 1850, when the Danes officially sold their fort and possessions to the British government. Her sources are government and church records, private letters, and official correspondence, from which she produces a discursive and cultural history of attitudes toward cassare marriages and the experiences of those who were its participants or offspring. Ipsen demonstrates how marriages in the early period of her study were vital to the survival and prosperity of Danish merchants and soldiers, and later to the commercial success of the Danish slave trade in an era when African rulers were much more powerful than their European partners. Many of the Danes who were married to Ga women learned to live within the rules and with the comforts of their wives’ compounds and lifestyles. However, by the late eighteenth century, consuming and displaying European culture and material became a way for women in cassare marriages and their children to claim protection and advantages of connection to the Danish church and fort. In making this shift, they managed to claim a truly intermediary and hybrid position of value to both Ga and Danish communities on the coast. Fifty years later, however, incipient colonialism brought such intermediary positions into question. While both the wives and children of Danes in the Osu region could occasionally still make claims on inheritance and schooling, they faced new challenges in seeking employment and association with the administration. As Ipsen demonstrates through both written works and art, the emergence of racialism played a large role in this transformation, bringing hybridity under attack even as Dano–Ga families were claiming a particular and distinct identity through their household goods and cultural practices.

Daughters of the Trade is structured chronologically, with consecutive chapters jumping forward twenty to fifty years but also moving occasionally from Christiansborg and Osu to Copenhagen and, briefly, the Danish Caribbean. Ipsen’s interpretation is clearly underpinned by cultural and literary studies theory with a gender studies inflection, although neither theory nor methodology is thoroughly elucidated in the introduction. Throughout, the cassare marriage remains at the center of her interpretive frame, changing over time but nevertheless consistently demonstrating several core features. In general, Ga women acculturated their husbands to their society more than they themselves became Danish. These women served their husbands as translators, cultural ambassadors, and trading partners. They also were frequently investors in their businesses and were often beneficiaries of their estates. The children of those marriages, in general, belonged to their mother’s extended families, and recognition by their fathers varied.

By exploring cassare marriages in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Ipsen brings to light the stories of numerous fascinating African women, beginning with Koko Osu, the daughter of the caboceer of Osu who was married to the future governor of Danish Christiansborg in the early 1700s, and concluding with Severine Brock, the Dano–Ga woman who married the last governor of the fort in 1842. Yet she has far more to say about the worldview and attitudes of Danish men like Ludewig Romer and Chaplain Elias Svane. It is not really fair to chide Ipsen for this imbalance, as the sources are clearly weighted in the direction of the males who could participate in transcontinental debates about the nature of interracial marriage and who wrote letters home to Copenhagen that have survived the passage of time. In fact, Ipsen’s ability to read these sources deeply, even to find meaning in parentheticals, is impressive. Yet in the long term, it will be important to draw the voices and experiences of women in cassare marriages from the margins of these sources or to find new evidence that allows us to do so. In the meantime, Ipsen has opened a previously closed window. In the process, she has provided us with an analysis of interracial marriage in the Atlantic that bridges the early modern and modern, as well as the precolonial and colonial, with significant implications for interpretations of better known cases in the Dutch, French, and British Atlantic.