Introduction
The account books of the Moravian mission in Suriname list an astonishing variety of goods: cotton, dyes and cloth, scissors and whetstones, hats and vests, buttons and buckles, cattle and nuts, even monkeys and birds. People were also declared as goods. The people involved in the trade were as diverse as the goods: Indigenous Arawak, enslaved and free people of African descent, Maroons, planters, Amsterdam merchants, and Thuringian tailors. All trade served to finance global as well as local missions.
An image of the mission’s setting emerges from the goods listed in the accounts: the tailors, the monkeys, the birds, the plantations with cattle and cotton. At the same time, the goods are an expression of a globalised economy in which colonial resources and European industrial goods cross the Atlantic. Other goods – for example, monkeys – have no defined function in the international trading system. In this case, what a missionary found in the local environment became a commodity. The missionary turned the monkey into part of a transatlantic economy that also had a moral goal: the spread of Christianity. Colonial, religious, and economic ideas merged.
The economy of the missionaries of the Moravian Church was integrated into a complex ethical and organisational system. It primarily served the mission – the transfer of Christian values, including a Christian economy, to the colonies.Footnote 1 The goods and obligations listed in the account books are thus integrated into a discursive system: into the understanding of what was traded and with whom. The ethics underlying these questions were first negotiated in the European communities and linked to the economic and religious norms there, which are described in the first part of this article. An analysis of the account books in the second step serves to answer the question of how the discursive framework of the Moravian economy was negotiated in the specific structure of the mission stations.
The reference point for the Moravian Church’s economy was Europe, especially the small town of Herrnhut in the Electorate of Saxony. The language of the account books was German. There was no obligation to provide the members of the local community – Indigenous people, Maroons, enslaved people – with written accounts of their work, profits, losses, or resources. The local languages (Sranan, Saramaccan, Lokono) did not get used for business documentation. The missionaries translated Indigenous and Creole languages in a religious but never economic context.
The moral and economic framework of this missionary community as part of the colonial economy involved the commodification and exploitation of a wide range of resources, animals, and even people.Footnote 2 In this article, I would like to examine how, why, and for what purpose all of these became commodities. To this end, I use several account books of Moravian missionaries in Suriname, which are currently archived in the Moravian archives in Herrnhut. The main focus of my work is on the years 1789–1814. In some cases, I also used an earlier account book from 1763.
I will examine these account books in the context of the following questions. Firstly, I am interested in the goods that the missionaries traded and their significance for various local, regional and global networks. I also examine the economic and social impact of these goods on the Moravian community. Using the account books, I will also explore how missionaries in the colonies treated animals and even humans as commodities. I am also interested in the economic, ethical, and colonial discourses in which the account books were embedded.
I will show that the account books reveal a great deal about the role of religious communities in the colonial economy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. I will thus first examine the function of the exchange of goods for the supraterritorial community. The Moravian community developed a collaborative system. The question of integrating individual initiative was a constant challenge. Both processes – community building through economic cooperation and the complicated embedding of individual initiative – affected the exchange of goods and the management of debts and loans. In their economy, the Moravians participated in a colonial discourse that relied on the exploitation of colonial resources. The missions were often located in places that had previously not been extensively penetrated by European colonial infrastructure. Here, as I will show, the missionaries contributed to the commodification of the colonial environment.
Some of the Moravian missionaries worked as tailors in the mission. As such, they were part of a globalized textile industry in the second half of the eighteenth century. Religious communities in colonial contexts such as the Moravians helped to connect peripheral regions to this globalised economy. In the colonies, this process was connected with the exploitation of enslaved people in cotton fields and factories. The missionaries listed the enslaved people in their books as “goods” and “investments.” However, an analysis of the accounts also provides insights into the development of wage labour in the colonies, which was initially closely linked to enslavement.
I examine the role of missions in the colonial context on the basis of five points of analysis: network and community, debt and profit as social categories, the commodification of the colonial environment, globalized textile crafts, and enslavement and labour. In doing so, I go beyond the narrower history of religion. In analysing the global significance of religion in the empires of the eighteenth century, it is crucial to understand religious communities not only as pious communities, but also as fields of social experimentation. This was the case both in Europe and in the colonies. First, however, I will situate my analysis within the state of research on religion and economy in Protestant communities.
The Sources: Moravian Accounts 1789–1811
For my analysis, I studied several account books from the Moravian Mission in Suriname between 1789 and 1811. They were produced in the four mission settlements of Paramaribo, Sommelsdijk, Hoop, and New Bambey. By this time, the missionaries had managed to arrange matters with the Dutch colony of Suriname, even though many planters still viewed them with suspicion as potential disrupters of the plantation order. The colonial administration valued the mission stations as a source of support for the weak colonial infrastructure and as potential initiators of craft and trade-oriented settlements in the predominantly agricultural colony. However, colonial institutions still largely neglected to provide active support for the mission, for example in financial terms.Footnote 3
Today, the majority of the Account Books are kept in the Moravian Archives in Herrnhut.Footnote 4 The author of the books was the head of the mission in the Surinamese capital Paramaribo. He also summarised the information from the outposts and sent the finished books to the Unity Elders’ Conference in Herrnhut, the governing body of the Moravian Church. All participants wrote in German, the lingua franca of the community. These accounts are mostly the final, carefully finalised versions.
In their books, the missionaries consistently applied the principles of double-entry bookkeeping. The records are always structured according to the same pattern. First, the economy of the entire mission is presented, followed by the individual locations, with the Paramaribo headquarters being dealt with first among them. The assets of each missionary community, i.e., real estate and inventory, are usually shown first. These also include the property of enslaved people. Following this is an accounting of the community’s income and expenditure. First, each mission station is considered as a whole. On the expenditure side, money is listed for food, medicine, labour costs, clothing, tools, etc., as well as investments, e.g., the purchase of enslaved people or trade goods for resale. Then, all trade goods sold, from monkeys to eggs or wood, are recorded under income. Commissions from Europe are also included. On both the debit and credit side, active and passive credits are listed.
Businesses and professions (tailors, bakeries, surgeons, etc.) have their own entries, which are attached to the relevant mission station. There are also several references to private businesses and responsibilities. These are scattered throughout the entries and generally do not have their own category.
Customs duties and fees are structurally assigned to their respective purpose – e.g., a journey or a trade good. The “state levies,” i.e., taxes, are listed as a separate item. It seems that the missionaries paid all the usual local taxes and duties. There were no special church regulations or privileges regarding taxes and duties. By reflecting the commercial, profit-oriented side of the mission in their accounts, the missionaries considered their dual role as economically oriented settlers and representatives of a church. They were part of the colonial economy through trade and taxes. The tight connection between settlement, economy, and mission was typical for the religious policy of Protestant empires in the eighteenth century.Footnote 5
Overall, via their books the missionaries gave the impression of clearly structured and institutionalised accounting. Their structure is schematic and precise. The accounts are clearly oriented towards an economic purpose and primarily serve trade. This was a desired and openly communicated part of the Protestant Pietist mission.
Moravians were, at least according to their idea, an economically centralised – or at least centrally controlled – economy. The image created in the account books corresponds to this narrative. Whether the books are actually as complete and transparent as they appear to be is an open question. In the eighteenth century, Suriname was a structurally weak colony plagued by corruption and smuggling.Footnote 6 In a few letters, the missionaries admitted to paying bribes, or at least hinted at it.Footnote 7 However, they never listed these openly in their accounts.
Religion and Economy in Protestant Communities
Various authors have already emphasised the value of account books as historical sources. For Max Weber, the meticulous observation of income and expenditure contributed to the history of capitalism.Footnote 8 Heinrich Lang described early modern account books as testimonies of an emerging “accounting subjectivity”: bookkeepers, he argues, influenced commodification processes by homogenising heterogeneous data.Footnote 9 Other authors, for example Almut Spalding, have analysed account books as a source of information about social relations, for example through the analysis of recorded gifts and donations.Footnote 10
The account books analysed concern the economy of a religious missionary community. This was a Protestant religious community with an economy based – at least in part – on joint property. Furthermore, the Moravian community documented its economy within a comprehensive global communication network.Footnote 11 As I will show, this economy was inseparable from the practice of the Christian Protestant religion.Footnote 12
In the late eighteenth century, the Moravian Church, which originally came from Upper Lusatia in the Electorate of Saxony, was still a relatively young religious community. It emerged in 1722, when Bohemian and Moravian religious refugees settled on the estates of the Pietist Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf. They named their settlement “Herrnhut,” i.e., a place under the “guard” of the Lord. In the following years, the religious settlers and the count built up a community based on clear hierarchies and strict social control. In 1727, binding rules for living together were laid down in the “Statutes of Herrnhut.” The Herrnhut community (internationally known as the “Moravian Church” or “Moravian Brethren” due to its partly Moravian origins) also included the idea of joint economic activity. The Moravians in Herrnhut became the model for many other Moravian communities that spread across Protestant Europe. In the late eighteenth century, other communities existed, for example in Thuringia, Silesia, Württemberg, and other German territories, as well as in the Netherlands, Denmark, England, and Ireland.Footnote 13
The Moravians began their missionary work in 1734. In the eighteenth century, they established missions in the Danish, British, and Dutch colonies, e.g., in Greenland, the Danish West Indies, Antigua, Jamaica, North America, and South Africa. Starting in 1735, they worked in the Dutch colonies Suriname and Berbice. As an international community, the Moravians maintained an extensive communication network. Periodicals such as the Weekly News (Wöchentliche Nachrichten) were regularly sent out from Saxony. Missionaries were obliged to participate in the network by sending letters, reports, diaries, minutes, and biographies. In the late eighteenth century, this exchange also included the obligatory bookkeeping sent to Herrnhut.Footnote 14 The emergence and multiplication of radical Pietist communities and revivalist religions coincided with the economic and social changes of the eighteenth century, based on factors such as population growth, the further development of stock exchanges and companies, the increase in wage labour and home-based work, and the gradual development of large agricultural enterprises.Footnote 15 European colonial expansion accelerated these processes and social change in the Atlantic region.Footnote 16 Christina Petterson has recently published a study on new Protestant movements, including Moravianism, and the emergence of capitalism. Using the example of missionary economies, she presents colonial expansion as a decisive impulse for social change, describing the missionary economy as the “production of an external, objective and deeply exploitative economic sphere supporting an otherwise moral, edifying, humanist cause” as “capitalism in a nutshell.” The Moravians neither adapted nor resisted capitalism; rather, they were “actors within and developers of early capitalism.”Footnote 17
The late eighteenth century was characterised by two processes: the development of a globally decentralised market and the emerging idea of a nation state defined by increasingly fixed borders, which emerged to socially organise globalised economies.Footnote 18 However, the nation state was challenged by religious communities such as the Moravian Church, which consisted of a network of closed communities and offered an alternative, supraterritorial form of social organisation. This network responded to the needs of its immediate environment. As Petterson has shown, the community was linked to the changes in the increasingly global textile economy.Footnote 19 Religious communities actively shaped social change in the late eighteenth century.
Veronika Albrecht-Birkner described the appropriation of social, political, and religious changes by Pietist communities starting in the late seventeenth century as a “reformation of life.” A new Christianity was to reform not only the church, but society as a whole.Footnote 20 The emerging communities did not consider work and economy as separate or separable from religion, but as an integral part of Christian community and a pious life. Wolfgang Breul, Benjamin Marschke, and Alexander Schunka have shown that the emergence of new market economies and alternative cultures of piety occurred in the period starting around 1650. According to the authors, the exact connections have not yet been sufficiently researched.Footnote 21
As Erika Hebeisen wrote, the era around 1800 was not just a time of religious secularisation.Footnote 22 Justus Nipperdey emphasises the economic basis of Pietism. It had its “roots” in cameralism, an economic form in which the “taming of self-interest” was programmatic and the community – usually the state – acted as an economic unit. As a genuinely cameralistic concept, Pietism accompanied the rise of capitalism, for example in the development of new forms of economic communalisation.Footnote 23 Religious groups were able to mitigate social change by forming communities.Footnote 24 However, as I will show below, the economies of religious communities were not always fundamentally oriented towards a slowdown; on the contrary, they could also develop a local dynamic of acceleration. This applied, for example, to the increasing commodification of people, animals, activities, spaces, land, and objects, which Karl Polanyi identified as a particular feature of the period around 1800.Footnote 25
Labour, trade, community, and religion went hand in hand in Pietist communities. The careful keeping of account books was therefore not only part of the everyday life of a religious community, but a religious practice. The description of local trade, the granting of credits, and the payment of taxes were integral parts of religious-economic community building. Working and trading and, finally, accounting were not only meant to guarantee the economic security of the settlement, but were also integral parts of its religious practice. In this sense, the development of an ‘accounting subjectivity’ was part of a specific pious identity.
Moravian Economies and Social Transformations
The Moravian community was embedded in economic processes from the very beginning.Footnote 26 Zinzendorf supported the colony of religious refugees from Bohemia and Moravia as well as Pietist settlers, which developed on his estates as a “craftsmen’s colony,” as Otto Uttendörfer described it. Farmers were rarely involved. The female members of the community also worked as craftspeople, often as spinners, weavers, or tailors.Footnote 27 The Moravian Community developed in the Saxon-Bohemian-Silesian region as a result of social and economic change. Christina Petterson has pointed out that the emergence of the community corresponded with the change from an agrarian, craft-based region to a society based on textile labour. The nobility, faced with social change as well, often accompanied this process in the leadership of the Moravian Church. Moreover, the transition to a capitalist economy, Petterson argues, was organised within the old feudal structures. Moravian communities were “relatively safe spaces.”Footnote 28 Many Moravians were part of a new, lower middle class that was to replace the former guild system.Footnote 29 At the same time, independent craftsmen remained in the community.
Depending on each person’s abilities, every Moravian was obliged to contribute to the economy of Herrnhut. Old and sick people received social support. A special feature of the Moravian economy was the rather strong centralised control of businesses. Community elders reviewed every request to establish a craft or a trade and generally only permitted the settlement of a craftsman after a review of the needs.Footnote 30 Moravians also controlled and coordinated trade between the community centres and with the outside world.Footnote 31 Unmarried members of the community used to live collectively in choirs. These choirs were economic units which gave unmarried women and men the opportunity to live in a domestic and economic relationship beyond marriage.Footnote 32 For many people, this certainly contributed to the attractiveness of the community.
Count von Zinzendorf’s understanding of economics was complex. His focus was on labour. For him, the industrious craftsman was a Christian ideal and part of following Jesus Christ. Luther had already described work as a duty and a service to God. Zinzendorf agreed with him.Footnote 33 The count’s priority was craftsmanship and trade. His idea was to make the community as independent as possible from agriculture and thus from land. This made the community flexible and, in principle, less dependent on the benevolence of territorial authorities.Footnote 34 The basic economic structures of the community hardly changed even after Zinzendorf’s death in 1760.
For the aristocratic Zinzendorf, however, economic success itself was more secondary. Economic principles, as the count saw it, were basically alien to the “Saviour’s favourites.”Footnote 35 These ideas particularly influenced the early Moravian community. Otto Uttendörfer suggests that during this period the Moravians accepted losses rather than keeping members out of work.Footnote 36
After Zinzendorf’s death in 1760, the Moravian community faced heavy debts. The 1764 synod extensively discussed the problem. Zinzendorf’s successor, August Gottlieb Spangenberg, reorganised the economy, while leaving the essential structure of the community untouched: community and choirs as the economic centre, control by elders, and a concentration on crafts and trade. Nevertheless, with the formation of central institutions such as the “Commercial Cabinet” (Commerzienkabinett) and the promotion of commercial enterprises, the Moravian community gained professionalism and gradually became more profit oriented.Footnote 37 The Moravians continued to organise their community along social and economic principles. Community towns became, as Peter Vogt describes them, “Christian social utopias.”Footnote 38
As Katherine Carté Engel and Thomas Dorfner have shown, the Christian interpretation of work was even more intense in the mission than within Europe. Since every activity was carried out in the service of the mission, all economic activities were also religious by nature.Footnote 39 Elders were all the more concerned that trading activities be conducted in harmony with biblical principles.Footnote 40 In the community, the concrete meaning of a “Christian economy” was controversial. Corresponding statements often resulted in commonplaces such as the rejection of “large” profits.Footnote 41 More concrete questions, such as whether commercial activities should be allowed on Sundays, were usually answered locally and situationally.Footnote 42 Simultaneously, the missions played a decisive role in the establishment of a transatlantic trading system. Their communities and missions were networked with each other and traded in various goods.Footnote 43
Moravian missions in the Atlantic world, like the European communities, varied considerably in their economic and social organisation. Carté Engel has pointed out the coexistence of very different economies, ranging from the “frontier communalism” of American communities to “international trade in ocean-going vessels.”Footnote 44 Regional and global trade relationships were intertwined. The preference for a combination of crafts and trade also existed in the mission, although in many places the missionaries weakened their aversion to an agricultural livelihood by acquiring plantations. The trade in plantation goods produced by enslaved people became an integral part of the Moravian economy.Footnote 45
Since 1735, the Moravians had organised missions in the Dutch colony of Suriname. Three missions existed there in the 1790s. One among the enslaved people in Paramaribo and the Sommelsdijk plantation, one among the Indigenous Arawak in Hoop, and one called New Bambey among the Maroons in Saramacca.Footnote 46 As figure 1 shows, the two small mission stations of New Bambey and Hoop were located far in the hinterland on the periphery of the colony with barely more than a handful of missionaries working there. While Hoop was still relatively well connected to the sea routes due to its location on the Corantijn River, New Bambey was in the middle of the tropical rainforest. Travelling there meant crossing narrow creeks. The missionaries had to be rowed there by the Maroons among whom they missionised.
Plan of Paramaribo with Suriname (Moravia Church establishments), Lithe. by A. Peterson 1853, David Rumsey Historical Map Collection.
Figure 1 Long description
Map of Paramaribo and Suriname divided into two sections. The top section details the city layout of Paramaribo, with streets and blocks clearly marked. A legend identifies key locations such as churches and public buildings. The Suriname River is prominently labeled, flowing through the city. The bottom section shows a broader view of Suriname, highlighting the Atlantic Ocean to the north and various geographic features. Rivers and settlements are marked, with a focus on the region′s layout and connections to Paramaribo. The map is a lithograph by A. Peterson dating from 1853. It is available via the “David Rumsey Historical Map Collection”.
The Sommelsdijk plantation and the mission in Paramaribo were on the coast. Here, as will be shown below, it was much easier for the missionaries to ensure integration into a transatlantic economy. This was mainly achieved through the businesses owned by the Moravian Church. There had been a tailor’s shop in Paramaribo since 1754, which became the economic and political hub of the Moravians in Suriname.Footnote 47 In 1793, a tailor’s shop was also opened on the Sommelsdijk plantation by the tailor Andreas Christian Randt.Footnote 48 There were no official businesses in the Hoop and New Bambey missions, but the missionaries at both posts were nevertheless required to participate in the mission’s economy.
As I have shown in a recently published article together with Jonas Schwierz, the Moravians often oriented their missionary economy around cameralistic principles. This included the principle of a positive overall balance for a community, which did not exclude debt. In addition, the “happiness,” i.e., the harmonious welfare, of a community guided by Christian morals was significant. In the colonies, cameralistic ideas were linked to the idea of a “civilising mission.”Footnote 49 Both the empire and the missionaries saw the settled farmer or craftsman as the ideal of colonial society. Indigenous and Creole groups were to be transformed accordingly, or they were to be replaced by European settlers. Ideally, missionaries did not simply build settlements based on the European model, but helped to create a “better,” “more Christian” Europe in the colonies by settling craftsmen and farmers. However, these ideas were discussed internally. Even some voices within the Moravian community warned against too much intervention in Indigenous societies.Footnote 50 Economy, community, and Christian lifestyle were closely interwoven in these discussions and considered inseparable. Christian communities also formed in the colonies as a reaction to a change that had been greatly accelerated there compared to Europe.
Thomas Dorfner has shown that the reference to a “Christian” economy as a “moral” economy was an advertising argument for the Moravians both inside and outside Europe.Footnote 51 In the colonies, they emphasised the “better,” “controlled” nature of their goods and trading activities by referring to their economic morality. They would not, at least they claimed, sell inferior goods or even weapons or alcohol to Indigenous groups without the consent of the rulers.Footnote 52 They presented themselves as controllable traders. In practice, however, the Moravians often proved to be more pragmatic than their basic moral considerations would suggest.
Eurocentric utopias and basic moral considerations of the Christian economy were countered in everyday life by the community´s close embedding in local economic practices, which, as Dorfner wrote, was not always motivated solely by economic considerations. Moravians also used trade and craft activities specifically to come into contact with particular groups or to evoke certain ways of life in a mission.Footnote 53 By “presenting an industrious life,” as Weber put it, they not only proved their “credit,” but also expressed successful mission through labour as “service to the glory of God.”Footnote 54 In this context, they certainly justified debts and losses even in the late eighteenth century.Footnote 55
In accordance with the economic framework of the Moravians, the missionaries focused their accounts on crafts and trade – even though, as will be shown, the type of goods traded differed significantly from those in Europe. In the order of the books, they listed each mission post and each business individually and described how work and trade was carried out there. According to the underlying narrative, every missionary and every mission post contributed to the success of the mission in a way that could be quantified. The missionaries were not only useful to the Moravian community through their work and their profits, but also as settlers for the colonial society.
Moravian Account Books as a Source for Labour, Trade, and Goods in Suriname
Missionaries handled all their accounts via Paramaribo, where their tailor shop, which they maintained next to a bakery and a clockmaker’s shop, was their regional centre. The mission head in charge sifted, collected, and copied the account books before sending them on to Europe.
The Paramaribo missionaries bought a large proportion of the goods needed for the mission and the businesses locally. In 1788 they spent 2700 florins on various goods in Paramaribo.Footnote 56 The missionaries on the Sommelsdijk plantation also maintained local economic relations. In addition to the tailor, a Moravian physician offered his services there.Footnote 57 His customers were mainly planters from the surrounding area, who sent enslaved people to him for treatment.Footnote 58 In addition to earning money, the focus was on establishing relationships. Both with the planters, who were notoriously suspicious of the mission, and with the enslaved people on the plantations, whom the missionaries hoped to convert. An important characteristic of the Moravian economy was thus its local embeddedness.
In addition, the missionaries established a regional network. Here, too, the tailor’s shop in Paramaribo acted as a nodal point. The peripheral mission Hoop on the Corantijn received food from Paramaribo. In 1789 it was wine, beer, salt, sugar, dram (an alcoholic drink similar to rum), and flour. When “little Burkhardt,” the child of a missionary couple in Hoop, received a “fraction band” from a surgeon, the missionaries in Paramaribo paid for it, as well as for various medicines.Footnote 59
The Paramaribo missionaries also sent food to Sommelsdijk, for example wine, tobacco with pipes, flour, and salted meat. The physician obtained medicine from Paramaribo. It is not entirely clear where these goods were originally from, although there is explicit mention of “Rhine wine.”Footnote 60 It is likely that a large proportion of the goods came from Europe, obtained either from the Moravians themselves or from merchants in the colonial capital. The internal regional trading network of the Moravians docked into an international trade in foodstuffs and luxury goods (Rhine wine, perhaps beer). Furthermore, the missionaries also forwarded colonial goods (tobacco) from the capital, although this grew wild in the Surinamese hinterland. The trade in European foodstuffs in the colonies was not necessary for subsistence, but served to cultivate European eating, drinking, and smoking habits. The economic dominance of European networks in global trade was accompanied by the cultivation of a “European” identity with corresponding consumer needs. Missionaries listed these goods as naturally necessary provisions that no longer needed to be justified. Keeping books was therefore also part of a definition of things in which a European missionary needed to participate. Bookkeeping became a practice in the formation of a colonial self-fashioning as a “European.”
Missionaries noted the buying of small personal items in their account books. One missionary bought a small mirror in Paramaribo in 1795, and another received a shotgun in 1803.Footnote 61 They generally sent paper, books, tools, clothing, newspapers, and utensils from Paramaribo to missions such as Hoop and New Bambey as needed and in small quantities.Footnote 62 Regional trade between Moravian community posts was often, but not exclusively, centred on the capital. In 1791, the missionaries from Sommelsdijk delivered cotton to New Bambey.Footnote 63 The missionary community in Hoop sold nuts and hammocks to all the mission stations.Footnote 64
Some missionaries traded on their own account, for example the tailor Johann Georg Arnold in Paramaribo. The missionaries included his purchases in the account books but recorded them as “private invoices.”Footnote 65 The tailor Andreas Christian Randt in Sommelsdijk also carried out private business in his tailor’s shop alongside the Moravian economy. His business is also integrated into the mission’s accounts but appears there as a special item.Footnote 66
It was explicitly noted when missionaries acted on their own initiative. In this way, the community was relieved of responsibility for individual trade, but retained documentation and control over the activities of the missionary. Account books reflect the normative framework of the Moravian trade networks. Communities coordinated international trade among themselves, individual communities coordinated regional trade with the outposts, and these in turn developed local networks. Individuals took a back seat in the accounting system, with the communes appearing as collectives with shared property. Individual initiative and private property were tolerated but socially controlled.
In addition to trade goods, missionaries documented their debts and profits in the account books as collective items. Creditors and debtors were the missionary posts or the two tailors’ shops. Individual missionaries or community members are only rarely identified in connection with credit.
As already discussed, in principle, the members of the Moravian community did not regard debts and loans as a fundamental moral problem. An unbalanced budget occurred from time to time.Footnote 67 Credit relationships, like trade relationships, are always social relationships, and hence the debts and loans recorded in the account books can also be read as descriptions of a relationship network.Footnote 68
A list of outstanding debts from the Paramaribo tailor’s shop exists for the year 1763. It is unclear who many of the names refer to. One name, Christian Pekorna, is marked “a free Negro,” a baptised man according to the name. In total, the tailor’s shop had granted loans totalling 998 florins to various people, most of which were small amounts of between six and 67 florins. A larger contribution of 128.17 florins stands out.Footnote 69 Credit relationships within Paramaribo are also noted for the years 1759–1762. In 1769, loans totalling 330.40 florins to “Fiskal Curtius,” who had already died in 1760, are particularly notable. Various people referred to as “free Negroes” are also mentioned as debtors.Footnote 70 The tailors therefore granted loans to members of various economic and social groups in Paramaribo, from the fiscal to the Creole urban population. Again, in exceptional cases, missionaries are included in the accounts as individuals. For example, the missionary Friedrich Vögtle granted a loan of 230 florins to the economy of the community, a considerable sum.Footnote 71
The Moravians also made a clear distinction in the credit system between the missionaries’ assets, if they had any, and the mission’s assets. Work and assets could also appear outside of missionary work. Mission as a profession certainly allowed for private areas beyond the occupation. It was above all the community capital that built up the missionary network. However, private property could – voluntarily – be used for support. The missionaries used credit to build up a network that included all social groups in Paramaribo.
In their account books, missionaries referred to the economic idea of the Moravian community as a shared economy that did not exclude individual initiative. However, they always focused their accounts on the economic success or failure of the mission as a whole. After all, as described above, each book was prefaced by the overall balance sheet. Only in relation to the community did crafts and trade become religious practices.
Despite all the openness towards debt, the community’s demand on missionaries to work and support the mission remained strong. It was a duty of the missions to transform their environment into usable goods – for the benefit of the mission. By recording them in the account books, they qualified and quantified living beings and things from their environment as goods. The double standard identified by Christina Petterson – exploitation for the sake of a higher goal – was almost perfectly realised in the mission stations, especially in Hoop.
The community in Hoop, consisting of Arawak and European missionaries, produced goods from almost anything the environment provided. They searched for resources that could be extracted from nature and experimented with their cultivation. Some cotton was planted and sent to Paramaribo, but cultivation does not seem to have caught on.Footnote 72 The mission, which was aimed at the mobile society of the Indigenous Arawak, suffered from a lack of permanent residents and therefore workers, as well as from weak infrastructural ties.Footnote 73 The permanent export of plantation goods such as cotton was not considered.
Accordingly, the Hoop community experimented with the products of very small crops, or even with collecting fruit. Various nuts in particular were sent to Paramaribo. In 1789 there was talk of “Indian nuts,” and sometimes “hora” or “pinda” nuts are mentioned, the latter probably referring to peanuts.Footnote 74 The missionaries also traded in “tonga beans” (tonka beans).Footnote 75 Furthermore, the community collected corals in the river and sold them to the capital.Footnote 76 In 1792 they supplied eggs.Footnote 77 The resources of the rainforest were more promising. Missionaries traded in rainforest timber, which had long been a global commodity by the eighteenth century.Footnote 78
Due to the low yield of these crops, the missionaries repeatedly tried to persuade the Arawak living in Hoop to produce consumer goods using cottage labour. This approach allowed the community to react relatively flexibly to the local labour force, in contrast to agriculture, which was dependent on long-term scheduling. In 1803, for example, Hoop supplied scissors to Paramaribo, probably to the tailors.Footnote 79
The trade in animals is particularly noticeable in Hoop’s economy. The community did not trade in livestock, but in exotic pets. In 1792, the Hoop missionaries sold monkeys to the capital.Footnote 80 In 1803, there is reference to “monkeys and bush birds.”Footnote 81 Even through this trade did not become permanent and there is hardly any mention of larger flows of goods, this is nevertheless an impressive example of the commodification of colonial nature.Footnote 82 The missionaries’ view of the flora and fauna of the rainforest was directed towards the exploitation of its resources. And where there were no resources, they invented some. Exotic pets, for example, which, tamed or caged, promised to domesticate what was considered “wild.”
At the Sommelsdijk plantation, the commodification of nature and the landscape did not play such a large role in everyday life as it did at Hoop. The post was located on a plantation that was already considered the quintessence of the colonial order of the environment.Footnote 83 In addition to the plantation goods and the products of tailoring, the missionaries traded in cattle.Footnote 84 The sale of tropical timber from Hoop in combination with the cattle trade from Sommelsdijk marked a turning point in the environmental history of the tropical rainforest.
In New Bambey in Saramacca, the community created very few goods. In 1791, 1804, and 1805 there was talk of the sale of a “corjar,” i.e., a boat or small ship.Footnote 85 In Saramacca, the missionaries had virtually no access to workers. The converted Saramaccan Maroons did not live in the mission, but in their own mobile settlement, which was followed by a tiny Moravian mission post. The missionaries did some gardening, but not for export.Footnote 86 Only occasionally did they send some cotton, tonka beans, peanuts, a few plums, or wood. They also traded in some leather, probably a hunting product.Footnote 87 Whether this came from their own hunting, was bought from the Maroons, or was received from them as a gift is unclear. The missionaries in New Bambey did not establish a solid export product. Nevertheless, noting this small trade in the account books at least gave the missionaries the appearance of contributing economically to the success of the mission through labour. The shipbuilding is remarkable. It suggests a creolisation of local craftsmanship. The craft tradition of the Moravians merged with the boatbuilding of the Maroons.
Another remarkable entry from New Bambey can be found in 1804. The Maroon Martha, it is noted here, sold three chickens to Paramaribo.Footnote 88 Even though this was a tiny item, it is a rare example of how private trade, integrated into the account books in individual cases, was also extended to non-European members of the community (the name suggests a baptised woman). The commodification of the – in the case of Saramacca – extreme colonial periphery was a creole process.
In the colonies, as in Europe, the Moravians centred their economy on textiles. Accordingly, the missionaries dealt with the topic intensively in their account books. Thuringia and Saxony were important international centres serving this trade. Moravian communities in Neudietendorf and Herrnhut coordinated the trade with the missionaries.
Temporarily the community seems to have sought a certain autonomy in the field of textiles, which included the production of resources. The missionaries grew cotton on the Sommelsdijk plantation. In 1793, the local tailor Andreas Christian Randt sent 50 pounds of cotton to Herrnhut and 180 pounds to the tailor’s shop in Neudietendorf.Footnote 89 Although the Moravian community was far from having an independent supply of raw materials, these attempts are remarkable. They remind us of the economy of the cameralist rulers who favoured autonomy. However, the Moravians did not think of this autonomy in territorial terms, but within their religious community.
The Moravian textile trade was oriented towards the transatlantic triangular trade. The community exported – limited – raw materials to Europe and received processed goods in return. In 1789, the missionaries received a box of “woolly stuff” and stockings from Neudietendorf.Footnote 90 Four years later, there was mention of a variety of goods from Neudietendorf and Herrnhut, for example silver buckles, textiles, and hats.Footnote 91 In 1795, the tailor in Paramaribo again ordered various goods from Thuringia and Saxony. These included “blue pergan,” probably a dye, shoes, linen, tamis, and grinding stones.Footnote 92 In general, the tailors had a wide range of different fabrics, including flannel, velvet, piqué, york, silk, and linen. Most fabrics were dyed blue or green, but there were also white cloths.Footnote 93 The missionaries described products related to the textile industry in detail. Those who kept the account books must have had expertise in this area. Consequently the accountants acquired specific professional capabilities based on the Moravian economy.
The missionary community in Hoop, notoriously looking for a source of income, also experimented with the production of textiles. They did not run a tailoring business, however, as there was a lack of suitably trained workers. Rather, they specialised in the production of hammocks, which were supplied to other mission stations. However, the documents do not indicate whether they were ever successful outside the mission places.Footnote 94
As far as possible, the Moravian missionaries tried to combine the demand for work and earning money with tailoring and textile production. They followed the pattern of the colonial trade routes, or rather they tried to. The missionaries – through the labour of enslaved people – procured raw materials in the colony and sent them to Europe, from where they received processed textiles (fabrics, stockings, hats) in return. At least part of the triangular trade was conducted within the community.
The Moravian textile business did not follow economic principles alone. Cotton exports from the Sommelsdijk plantation were far too small to supply the Moravian tailors of Europe – or even just Neudietendorf – to any significant extent. And the few hammocks sold from Hoop could have had little impact on the local economy. Nevertheless, the Sommelsdijk cotton and Hoop hammocks had two important functions.
First, the missionaries provided work through textile production, namely a type of work that was recognised as such both in Europe and in the colonial society of Paramaribo. Sommelsdijk would hardly have been considered a plantation without crops. And Hoop, as a community of hunters and bird trappers, would never have fitted the model of the industrious artisan colony without the textile craft. However, it was precisely this acceptance that was essential for the social and economic “credit” of the Moravians in the colony.
The second reason for the “small” colonial goods – a few pounds of cotton from time to time, a few hammocks – was probably their experimental nature. The “safe space” of regional and transatlantic Moravian trade allowed the value of goods and raw materials to be “tested” for their market value. In this respect, innovations could take place on a small scale without great fear of failure.
An integral part of international labour in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was enslavement. The missionaries openly communicated with Europe about the fact that they owned enslaved people. Account books contain no taboos about the trade in enslaved people or the exploitation of their labour. Slavery was established in the economic self-image of colonial communities, including the Moravians. People were considered to be commodities.Footnote 95
Inventories of enslaved people exist for all of Suriname’s missions. In 1814, Sommelsdijk lists twenty people bought by missionaries who worked on the plantation and in the tailor’s shop. They were between two and seventy-five years old. In addition to age, the missionaries recorded the “purchase price,” the “value of the previous year,” and the “current monetary value.”Footnote 96 In Paramaribo, the missionaries recorded twenty-three enslaved people in the account book for 1791, most of whom either worked in tailoring or were described directly as “property” of the tailors. In addition, enslaved men and women worked as gardeners, carriers, cooks, laundrywomen, house maids, nannies, and kitchen staff. Three enslaved people worked in the Moravian community’s bakery. Missionaries appear as slave traders in the tailors’ accounts from the years 1759–1763. Accordingly, loans from the sales of three enslaved people were still pending. An Indigenous enslaved woman was sold within the Moravian mission.Footnote 97 The missionaries documented the commodification not only of human labour but of the whole person in the account books with terrifying dispassion.
However, labour, especially in the tailor shops of Paramaribo and Sommelsdijk, was not only based on the purchase of enslaved people. The annual accounts for Sommelsdijk from 1814 list 220 florins “wages” for “tailor negroes.”Footnote 98 In general, labour costs for craftspeople were a considerable item, for example for the maintenance of the mission house.Footnote 99 The missionaries also paid people of African descent to accompany and support travelling missionaries and carry their belongings, for example for rowing across the rivers to the distant mission in Saramacca.Footnote 100 The surgeon at Sommelsdijk employed a free person of African descent for a “salarium” of 225 florins per year.Footnote 101 Occasionally missionaries reported costs for nurses who cared for sick missionaries.Footnote 102 The purchase and wage labour of people of African descent existed simultaneously in the missions.Footnote 103 The documents do not reveal whether the people working for wages were enslaved or free. An entry in the account book from 1789 shows that the boundaries were fluid. It mentions labour costs for people enslaved by missionaries. They had earned this “extra” outside the community as “craftsmen.” They were able to earn over 410 florins that year.Footnote 104
Due to the shortage of craftspeople in the colonies, trained people of African descent were in great demand. This applied to both free and enslaved people. In addition to slave labour, wage labour was also introduced in the missions. Furthermore, as well as the payment of casual labour – for example when travelling – textile production was an essential prerequisite for the integration of the labour of a transatlantic group of workers.
The accountants of the mission in Suriname thus had yet another role to play. In addition to trade, loans, taxes, and duties, they were also employers who had to calculate wages. Labour as a basic element of Moravian business ethics took on a new dimension. Whether the question of moral or just wages followed from the documentation of these payments would be a worthwhile future research project.
Conclusions
I began my article with the question of what can be learned about the role of religious communities in the colonies from the Moravian account books of the second half of the eighteenth century. For this purpose, I first looked at the significance of the goods listed there in the internal and external network of the Moravians. In the next step, I went beyond the “classic” flows of goods to include “smaller” items. What was actually even considered a potential “commodity”? What was turned into a commodity? And in a third step, I have attempted to reconstruct the underlying moral, economic, and colonial discourses of the Moravian account books.
In my approach, five points of analysis emerged that are significant for the role of religious communities in the colonial economy of the eighteenth century. These were network and community, debt and profit as social categories, commodification of the colonial environment, globalized textile crafts, and enslavement and labour.
My research builds on a wide range of inspiring literature on the role of religious communities in the economy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The Moravians emerge as a community that accompanied and adapted to economic and social change. Their communities were certainly a field of experimentation in the period around 1800.
In my analysis of the account books, I showed that collective economic action was clearly at the centre of the trade of the Moravians from the Surinamese missions. The community kept its account books as a collective subject. Individuals generally acted in their role as consumers. However, the community tolerated the private initiative of individual missionaries or Indigenous and Creole members. At this point, the community stepped back from economic responsibility without relinquishing control over the economic behaviour of its members. The community thus reduced the risks of the global economy through collectivisation.
The economic activities of the Moravians in Suriname served not only to finance but also to maintain various networks, which could be local, regional, and global. These included various colonial groups and ethnicities. Loans and debts had a comparable function to goods, whereby the relationships between collective and private initiative and ownership were structured similarly.
The economy of the Moravian missionaries was not only a necessity to support the mission, but also had strong moral connotations. Labour, trade, and profit not only served the service of God; they were worship themselves. The representation of industriousness, trade networks, and a certain form of labour also legitimised the Moravians in the mission. Both the colonial powers and potential converts found the Moravians attractive above all in their role as economically stable craftspeople.
It was all the more serious when small missions such as Hoop or New Bambey did not really know how they could participate economically at all. In these cases, everything possible was turned into a commodity: nuts, boats, corals, and even monkeys and birds. The Moravians represented the colonial legitimisation of eighteenth century empire on a micro level. Colonies had to generate profit, and everything could potentially become a commodity. This commodification of the colonial environment involved all colonial groups and became a hybrid process.
On the other hand, the Moravian textile trade served classic colonial commodity flows. The Moravian community saw itself in the cameralistic sense as a collectively acting body with a comprehensive understanding of economics. This enabled them to recognise market economy principles externally, while also promoting innovation internally within the protected framework of the Moravian experimental space.
Labour organisation in the colonies differed from that in Europe in one key aspect. In Suriname, enslavement was the basis of labour. The missionaries consequently integrated enslaved people into their accounts. Slavery became a standard item in colonial – and therefore global – accounting. However, the limits of the system were already apparent. There was a shortage of flexible, well-trained labour. Accordingly, the missionaries increasingly recorded wages in their account books. The lines between free and unfree labour began to blur. The economic ethics depicted in the account books still stemmed entirely from the cameralistic ideas of the eighteenth century. With the transatlantic emergence of wage labour, this gradually came to an end.
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