Introduction
There is an axiom that individual lives can illuminate larger macrohistorical issues on the grounds that the layered nature of social biographies or life histories takes in cultural, ideological, material, spatial, and temporal elements. A special issue of the Journal of World-Systems Research considers biography a fruitful entry point into macrohistorical sociology, specifically into the historical dynamics of a world-system's macrostructures.Footnote 1 Life histories can be likened to events in Fernand Braudel's understanding of the event, episode, or action as one timeline in multiple temporalities.Footnote 2
In the eighteenth century the Atlantic slave trade and Caribbean sugar production represented new economies of Euro-Atlantic mercantile capitalism—the globalisation of enslaved African labour, on the one hand, and the industrialisation of plantation sugar production and the proletarianisation of the enslaved labour force, on the other.Footnote 3 The Scandinavian Atlantic, more specifically the Danish-Norwegian colonial-mercantile formation was a product of the ascendant and globalizing Euro-Atlantic political economy. Throughout the Atlantic basin the horizon and scale of activities expanded and commercial circuits became conduits for political and cultural exchange and new forms of symbolic and ideological representation.Footnote 4 The dynamics of Atlantic West African history created concomitantly waves of forced labour migration to the Americas, new technologies and new outlooks, and distinct regimes of social property relations.Footnote 5
The present article seeks to map and identify the back and forth movements and exchanges between the microlevel of life history experiences and the dynamics of macrolevel structures at different spatial scales and within longer and shorter time frames.Footnote 6 The purpose is to link, analytically, agency and structure, on one side, and the political and the personal, on the other. These phenomena and relationships are conceptually subsumed in two categories: “exchanges,” denoting material and social relations and relationships, and “crossroads,” denoting the meeting of two or more roads but also connoting being-in-the-world which entailed, inter alia, fame, fortune, poverty, filth, defeat, enslavement, dependence, and other existential conditions.Footnote 7
Primary sources and historiographical works pertaining to the themes of this study refer to multiple existing cultures, settings, and relationships in the Atlantic basin. To analyse agency and structure and the personal and political in this matrix, categories like exchanges and crossroads are methodologically useful as indicators of particular kinds of relations. Exchange signifies spaces of flows, long-distance movements of people, ideas, institutions, goods, and mercantile circuits under historically specific world-system organizational conditions. Crossroad, a category that presupposes a hierarchical societal order, signifies a range of personal and collective possibilities and experiences in a world-system of long-distance interconnection. Linking contingency and structure, crossroad represents a space of places perspective. Within the Atlantic world's spaces of flows, West African Christians constructed cultural spheres, as manifested in sociolinguistic entanglements (multilingualism and the production of multilingual texts) and personal destinies as revealed in conversion strategies, including collective and individual forms of activity.
The complex and entangled relationship that the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scandinavian Atlantic had with African historicity is considered in the following discussion with reference to two African Christians who, it is argued, personified the ambiguities of this relationship. Both produced multilingual texts, which were events in their own right. One of the them was a woman, Damma/Marotta/Madlena (d. 1745), originally from Great Popo (western Slave Coast), who was enslaved and later manumitted in the Danish-Norwegian colony of St. Thomas in the West Indies.Footnote 8 The other, Christian Jacob Protten (1715–1769), was an Afro-Dane (or Euro-African), originally from Accra-Osu (eastern Gold Coast). He studied at the University of Copenhagen.Footnote 9 The question is: what history produced these two individuals?Footnote 10
From a longue durée perspective the histories of the Gold Coast and Slave Coast regions and the social biographies of Damma/Marotta/Madlena and Protten intersect the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century tectonic shifts in geopolitical alignments and configurations of power that polarised the landscapes over much of the Atlantic West Africa macroregion.Footnote 11 From the thirteenth to the late sixteenth century, long-distance communication and commercial routes, which integrated much of the macroregion including the Gold Coast and the Slave Coast (Bight of Benin), were anchored by two imperial dynastic hegemonies—one based in the Middle and Upper Niger basin (the Mali-Songhai imperium) and the other in the Chad basin (the Kanem-Borno imperium). These hegemonies were economic and commercial fulcrum points of the Atlantic West Africa macroregion. The late sixteenth-century collapse of the Niger-based imperial centre contributed to the emergence of competing subimperial entities, state and nonstate, that fought and struggled to fill the power vacuum. A unipolar geopolitical order gave way to a multipolar world of warfare, social unrest and upheaval, millenarian movements, and economic and political transformations. New scales of network structuring and new hierarchies of labour appeared as a result of organizational changes to secure order and long-distance commercial integration. In addition, social differentiation based on wealth, power, and class was established in terms of social property relations.Footnote 12
The crises accompanying these social and institutional developments created waves of forced migration to the Americas. Historical studies have established that before 1800–1820 the transfer of labour out of Africa was considerably greater than the transfer of labour out of Europe. Between 1580 and 1820 some 8.7 million versus 3 million Europeans crossed the Atlantic to the American colonies.Footnote 13 The longue durée social development of the Atlantic West Africa macroregion can be connected to its central role in an ancient multicentric global world-system, a centrality that was not neutralised by the macroregion's ports' interactions with Euro-Atlantic mercantile capitalism and the commercial transactions of royal chartered trading companies.Footnote 14 Various institutional complexes emerged in the Gold Coast region, for example, as mercantile- and military-oriented political systems, and in the Slave Coast region the palace and/or the walled city as a site of wealth extraction and distribution, to deal with the macro-region-wide crisis and at the same time to engage with an expanding Euro-Atlantic mercantile capitalism.Footnote 15
Two African Christians
The social biographies and texts of Damma/Marotta/Madlena and Protten are indices to wider spatial and organizational contexts, events and thresholds, and historical changes. Damma/Marotta/Madlena, who lived on a sugar plantation in the Danish-Norwegian Caribbean, belonged to a family that was part of the middle strata of Great Popo's propertied classes. Some members of these classes were literate Christians, i.e., followers of Catholicism. Her father, perhaps a broker-interpreter, was a Christian.Footnote 16 The emergence of the port's middle strata is traceable to the expansion and development of Atlantic commercial circuits from the mid-sixteenth century onwards. The middle strata comprised specialised and hierarchically ranked social-occupational groups, such as brokers, interpreters, artisans, priests and priestesses, and lower level officials. Their ranked statuses carried cultural and symbolic values, which in some instances were codified as a power relation through conversion to Christianity, literacy in European languages, and access to powerful patronage networks.Footnote 17 The human capital of the middle strata (knowledge, skills, and competencies) enabled Great Popo to function as an important supplier of provisions to slaving ships. Due to its position in the lagoon system it facilitated communication along the coast between trading companies' commercial stations on the eastern Gold Coast and their factory or lodges on the eastern Slave Coast. In the late seventeenth century an expansionist military kingdom (Akwamu) conquered the eastern Gold Coast, including Accra-Osu, and in 1702 its army of five to ten thousand musketeers occupied Great Popo and other Slave Coast ports.Footnote 18 Damma/Marotta/Madlena's capture and deportation to the colonies in the Caribbean probably occurred at this time. On the other hand, Protten and his relations lived as high-status, privileged subjects under an oppressive Akwamu suzerainty.
In Great Popo intellectual and religious culture was a rich mix of Catholicism (from the late sixteenth century), Vodun (from the sixteenth century), and Ifa (pre-fifteenth century) and a range of socio-political ideas regarding the constitutive tension and struggle between social and political forces (Yoruba: asuwada; alasuwada).Footnote 19 The port was on the western edge of the Yoruba-Aja Commonwealth, which one study describes as follows:
The intellectual climate of the region was and still is largely characterised by a dialogic ethos, a constant pursuit to exchange ideas, experience, and material culture. Each city was a locus of intellectual interaction between intellectuals (babalawo, herbalists, poets, artists, etc.).… Polyglottism was a common feature among intellectuals, and the Yoruba language … was the preferred language of intellectual discourse of the entire region, particularly among diviners.Footnote 20
The political and social imaginary of Great Popo would have been shaped by the translocal communications and intercultural and intellectual connections of the Commonwealth.
Within the context of the Aja-Yoruba Commonwealth and the dense web of shared ritual practices, ideas, beliefs, and institutions with Olukumi (or Yoruba) as a single lingua franca, Damma/Marotta/Madlena would have known the concept asuwada (or alusawada), whose signification embraced a corpus of ideas concerning the making or creating of human society. It emphasised principles of association and sociality. Society—the material, social, cultural, institutional, and ideological realms of societal life—brings into existence various potentials and constructs: it creates, it destroys and it modifies. Society-making created the free citizen and the non-citizen, literally “thing belonging in cords and deprived of liberty.” Asuwada and other doctrines were codified in the meta-languages (rituals; ceremonialism) of If a and Vodun. As a social doctrine asuwada advocated a praxis of citizens' political engagement in different forms of collective struggle.Footnote 21
Protten, an Afro-Dane (or Euro-African), studied at the Christiansborg Castle school in Accra-Osu (1722–1727), with a private tutor in Copenhagen (1727–1732), and in the Faculty of Theology at the University of Copenhagen (1732–1735). He taught for a year in St. Thomas (1743–1744) and, later, at the Christiansborg Castle school. While a student he converted to Moravian Pietism in 1735.Footnote 22 Through his mother's kin he belonged to a politically and socially distinguished affective (kin) network. The prominence of his ancestral line very likely had its roots in local history as local managers of Great Accra–Portuguese commerce when the sixteenth century Great Accra urban complex was one of the world's leading exporters of gold.Footnote 23 Protten's ancestors were among the Accra elites who provided the infrastructure, including human capital and material resources, to support Danish-Norwegian trading establishments along the eastern Gold Coast seaboard.Footnote 24 This achievement was due to the elites' social and patronage networks, which engaged in information and resource sharing through marriages, alliances, contracts, and so on.Footnote 25 Protten's patrimony allowed him a culture of privilege and (relative) leisure.
Accra-Osu was the headquarters of Danish-Norwegian commercial transactions in Lower Guinea ports.Footnote 26 The functionality of Accra-Osu as a trading company headquarters and as a world port owed much to the elaboration of social and spatial divisions of labour in the eastern Gold Coast as a consequence of urbanizing and state-building processes over the longue durée. Accra-Osu functioned as a site of entangled spaces.Footnote 27 Local cultural and ideological mediation of Accra-Osu's entangled spaces was expressed at a societal level in established institutions, ceremonies, and rituals and on a personal level in some of Protten's writings.Footnote 28 His texts include an extensive correspondence, an autobiographical essay (published in German in a 1741 Moravian newsletter), a diary (Diarium), a travel journal (Reise-Diarium), poetry, a grammar of the Fanti and Ga languages (published in Copenhagen in 1764), and a Lutheran catechism. He wrote in Danish, Dutch, Dutch Creole, and German as well as two Gold Coast languages—Ga (Accra) and Fanti (Amina).Footnote 29 He certainly would have known Portuguese Creole (Neger Portugisisk) which was a lingua franca (General-Sprog) in Gold Coast and Slave Coast ports.Footnote 30
Upper-class Accra ideology codified and theorised distinctions of class, lifestyle, patrimony, and status as grounded in the nature of the universe (fate), the nature of nature (order/disorder), the nature of human nature (rational/irrational), and the nature of society (independence/dependence). A key concept was “crossroad(s),” an idea with multiple and antithetical meanings: opportunity, achievement, affluence, health, prestige, and power, on the one hand, and defeat, loss, failure, poverty, dependence, sickness, tragedy, and disgrace on the other.Footnote 31 This phenomenological view of social existence mediated the junctures of life's conditions as these were experienced by elite households. Protten's agency as a university student and a convert to Moravian Pietism enabled him to acquire cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and thus a cosmopolitan lifestyle in an Atlantic-based world-system. His crossroad experiences in western Africa, in the West Indies, and Northern Europe and his transatlantic travels can be marked as distinct features of early modern flows and places in the Atlantic world-system.
In a diary entry dated 12 May 1743, the Moravian missionary Johann Brückner reported that Christian Protten arrived at the St. Thomas colony from Guinea. He sailed on a Danish-Norwegian slave ship that carried a total of ninety-five enslaved men, women, and children.Footnote 32 In 1726 he sailed aboard the slave ship Christiansborg with 391 enslaved Africans, arriving in St. Thomas in February 1727 with 207 survivors, before heading to Europe and Copenhagen.Footnote 33 Under the auspices of the Moravian church and its leader Count Ludwig Zinzendorf he served as a teacher at the St. Thomas school for Moravian converts (1743–1744), whom he refers to in one of his letters as liebe Schwartzen (“beloved Blacks”) and armen heyden (“poor heathens”).Footnote 34 While teaching, Protten met Damma/Marotta/Madlena. At the time she was a “venerated evangelical church elder” of the Moravian congregation, having converted to Moravian Pietism in 1736. In the late 1730s and early 1740s she proved to be instrumental in founding a Moravian congregation in spite of the intransigent and violent opposition of the majority of the island's plantation owners.Footnote 35
Pietism was not only a matter of belief but also a language. For Marotta, Pietism was a language of communal or collective protest in which she and her fellow Pietist converts decried and opposed the practices and situations of domination, which was oppressive, alienating, and humiliating. Their quest for spiritual security and solace in a brutal environment can be expressed as “marronage of the soul,” entailing not passivity but ecclessiogenesis (“making a church”), that is, Pietist converts engaged in creating, in asuwada sense, a new kind of institutional coherence and meaning in the settler colony. In Protten's case, Pietism was a language of self-realization and personal salvation, which did not countenance overt opposition to or protests against chattel slavery.Footnote 36 Born out of a plurality of negative circumstances selfhood and personal spiritual redemption were the markers of Protten's crossroad.
Can it be said that the two Pietists' texts map the internal dialectics and hybridity of Danish-Norwegian and Gold and Slave Coast interaction and entanglement, bridging temporal, spatial, and social boundaries and cataclysmic historical events? In any case the worldliness of their texts encompasses a conjunction of local, regional, and global elements (cultural, ideological, institutional, and philosophical) in a period that is historiographically defined as a time of transition throughout the Atlantic world.Footnote 37 The Pietists' lives and textual practices reveal in different ways the complex links and articulations between exchanges, as material relations and crossroads, as ideological and social relations.
Crossroads
An underlying proposition of the discussion is that micro-histories of individual lives, like the lives of the two Pietists, are able to illuminate and reflect the macro-histories of the Atlantic West African world as well as the entanglements of the Atlantic world, characterised by overlapping layers of ideologies, pursuits, textual practices, and agencies.
Damma/Marotta/Madlena authored and coauthored petitions to the king and queen of the Danish-Norwegian composite state. The petitions were written in Dutch, Dutch Creole, and Aja-Gbe, her mother tongue.Footnote 38 One of her petitions, written in February 1739, was addressed to the Danish-Norwegian queen on behalf of more than 250 enslaved and freed women converts to Pietism. It was published in a Moravian newsletter in 1741 in two versions. One version, signed Damma (Minzu Gnonù en bo ma poppo), was in her mother tongue, Aja-Gbe. The other version was in Dutch Creole and was signed “Marotta now Madlena of Popo in Africa (van Poppo uyt Africa).”Footnote 39 A translation of the Dutch Creole follows:
“Great Queen! At the time I lived in Popo, I served Lord Mau. Now I have come to the land of the Whites, and they will not allow me to serve the Lord Jesus. Previously, I did not have any reason to serve Him, but now I do. I am very sad in my heart that the Black women of St. Thomas are not allowed to serve Lord Jesus. The Whites do not want to obey Him. Let them do as they wish. But when the poor black brethren and sisters want to serve the Lord Jesus, they are looked upon as maroons. If the Queen thinks it fitting, please pray to the Lord Jesus for us and let her intercede with the King to allow Baas Martin to preach the Lord's word, so that we can come to know the Lord and so that he can baptize us Blacks in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. May the Lord save you and bless you, along with your son and daughter and your whole family. I will pray to the Lord Jesus. In the name of over 250 Black women, who love Lord Jesus, written by Marotta now Madlena of Popo in Africa.”Footnote 40
From an asuwada perspective Marotta's initiative can be read as an effort to resolve the distinction between Christian citizen-subject and Christian non-citizen-subject by creating a political and public space for a church and a school. Marotta/Madlena was involved in a collective struggle with other men and women converts, some of whom were from Slave Coast ports and were also multilingual and literate. In the same month she coauthored with several other converts a petition (in Dutch) that presented grievances to the Danish-Norwegian king on behalf of more than 650 converts to Pietism:
“Merciful King! We hope that Your Majesty will order that we be given permission to continue to learn about our Lord Jesus. We are steadfast in our determination to do so if it pleases God, our Lord, despite all the oppression by those who have come to beat and injure us when the Baas [Martin] teaches us about the Savior, by those who burn our books, call our baptism the baptism of dogs, and call the brethren beasts, declaring that Blacks must not be saved and that a baptized Black is no more than kindling wood for the flames of Hell.… We desire only to send our souls to Heaven to the Lord Jesus. We used to steal from our masters, run off as maroons, run away to Porto Rico, indulge in laziness, and pilfer provisions from our masters. But now it is otherwise with us, as our masters themselves well know. Many a Black has suffered amputation of feet and hands as punishment for his pursuit of evil. As for ourselves, we would gladly place our heads under the axe in defense of our congregation and for the sake of Lord Jesus, if our masters have killed us, as they say. May the Lord bless our most merciful king thousand times.”Footnote 41
The two petitions indicate that the converts, as advanced social actors in an industrializing plantation system, had original organization and strategic capabilities, self-discipline, and moral philosophies.
The collective struggles of Pietist converts in the Danish-Norwegian settler colonies was not part of Protten's agenda. His autobiographical essay recounts his student life in Copenhagen and his conversion to Pietism.
“We [i.e., Protten and classmate Frederik Svane (1710–1789)] were assigned to the blacksmith trade, because that was to be more profitable in Africa, but we had no desire to do it and gave the pastor [Elias Svane, their tutor] no peace until he permitted us to continue our studies, which we did for the next four years. However, I felt that the Lord wanted to help me in many different ways. He shook and jolted me, he moved me most deeply. But I always crept away and wept. I was still too young, too immature, too give myself up to the Cross. If I had been a student and had had a little freedom, I would have wanted to give myself over to the Lord. I became a student in the year 1732 and as I made my way further in the world the unfettered free life led me to be deceived by fleshly desires. I entered, in a word, into the greatest unhappiness and danger, so that I thought, not only do you fare badly among people, you have no peace with God. I can go on no longer in the world with my heart so restless. Indeed, I found little lasting peace either day or night for two or three years. Then the law pressed me and unfulfilled duties made demands on me. I could not accept the Lord's grace because I did not know Him yet.”Footnote 42
In search of inner peace—spiritual security and redemption—Protten joined the Moravian movement in 1735, the moment of his fulfilment. As a schoolmaster at the Christiansborg Castle school Protten wrote in 1757: “The Saviour has given me an open door here. I know that I am not the man through whom the Saviour can do things.” Two years later he expressed feelings of solitude and disappointment, partly because he had no success as a Moravian missionary in Lower Guinea towns.
“As for my inner condition, it is forever changing. Sometimes I hold the Saviour as close as one can hold anything, sometimes there are tears, and not without cause. On those days I sing: Take me anew by the hand that lets nothing fall, and let my soul never out of Your trusting arms. I cry, I laugh, I am quiet, and am still here in this country quite alone, alone.… In body I am still fairly healthy, yet dejected and melancholy, because among so many people I must continually live like a hermit … the energy has accomplished nothing, but I have been placed between two seats.”Footnote 43
Protten's crossroad experiences were internalised as a personal sense of incongruity and anxiety. On the one hand, his experiences can be located objectively in the hierarchical structuration of flows (commodities, enslaved bodies, ideas, and institutions) and places (plantations and world ports) that defined the Atlantic triangular trade. On the other hand, he subjectively externalised his conditions into a bigger and more powerful whole outside of himself, that is the Savior, a Christian figuration. His crossroad experiences entailed a peculiar dialectic between his own powerlessness and the power of the Savior.
Protten's despair was not due to the sudden loss of his patrimony, that is, his elite position, influence, and privileges, in Accra-Osu society. Given his social status and place of residence, an overarching frame of reference was the movement of captive bodies and commodities into and out of Christiansborg Castle. Protten's accomplishments as a student, schoolmaster, and Moravian missionary and his apparent alienation represent the separation of his subjective activity (agency) from its objective conditions and its immersion in the substantial totality of the Euro-Atlantic mercantile capitalist world-system. There was another totality in the form of Asante dominion over Accra-Osu and the eastern Gold Coast and Asante's position in the Asian-African-Mediterranean interregional system.Footnote 44 This conjuncture framed the cosmopolitan itinerary of Protten's crossroad experiences in the Scandinavian Atlantic as well as his engagements with other sectors of the Atlantic world.
Exchanges
How do Damma/Marotta/Madlena and Protten fit into Atlantic world history as historical agents? Do the dynamics of the Atlantic world determine the politics of their textual production? A fundamental theme in master narratives about the early modern Atlantic world concerns the movements of people, ideas, and things in an interdependent world, encompassing Africa, the Americas, and Europe and many islands, from the Canary Islands near West Africa to the Caribbean islands and Bermuda in the North Atlantic. From the fifteenth century onwards, one study asserts, “histories of Europe, the Americas, and Africa became inextricably linked.… Such contact effectively forced all of the societies which border the Atlantic Ocean to confront new—and interrelated—problems.”Footnote 45 Through the early modern period the horizon and scale of activities expanded and commercial circuits became conduits for political and cultural exchange in the creation of the Atlantic world. Viewing Atlantic world history from a world-systems perspective, other works analysed the structural features of this history according to an expanding Euro-Atlantic mercantile capitalism as a socioeconomic, socioecological, and geocultural system embedded in cycles of capital accumulation.Footnote 46 A third investigation of Atlantic world history proposes three distinctive phases, ranging from an initial period “characterized by conflict as alien and indigenous people came together” through a second period of “development and integration into the larger Atlantic system” and a third phase featuring revolutions and “a proud sense of independence among Creole cultures.”Footnote 47 In this periodization Atlantic/ West Africa is not a site of historical agency.Footnote 48
Still another historiographical perspective emphasises the centrality of slavery in early modernity. Andrew Zimmermann maintains, for example, that “slavery remained an especially important mediator between Africa, Europe, and the Americas, not only in the economics of exploitation but also in politics and culture.” Continuing, the author says that “we can … follow historians of Africa and African diasporic societies in locating [European] modernity in an Atlantic history whose basis is not British industrial society but rather struggles over slavery and other forms of confinement not only in Europe but also in Africa and in the Americas. Both political economy and the analysis of biopolitics have demonstrable origins in Africa and in diasporic African societies.”Footnote 49
A recent monograph spells out the status of the Atlantic West African world in the Atlantic world commercial sphere in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: “Die Küste Westafrikas ware fine der wichtigsten Kontaktzonen der Fruhen Neuzeit. Zahlreiche europäische Handelskompanien konkurrierten hier um Gold und Sklaven, Handelsrechte und Stützpunkte.”Footnote 50 The movement of resources to the commercial enclaves of trading companies was connected to wider systemic concerns and geopolitical (re-)alignments in the Lower Guinea hinterland and beyond.Footnote 51 Tons of mass-manufactured trade goods from Europe, tobacco from the Americas, cowries from the Maldives, and textiles from India were transported along urban-dominated military-political and prestige goods networks and were consumed in political capitals, royal palaces, commercial centres, and wealthy and privileged households.Footnote 52 Huge and powerful economic and ideological interests were tied up in Atlantic maritime circuits and coerced transfers of labour into Atlantic settler-colonial plantation economies.
The Scandinavian Atlantic, a social and economic organization predicated on the accumulation of capital through settler colonies and sugar plantations in the Caribbean and commercial stations on the Lower Guinea seaboard, was a product of an ascendant Euro-Atlantic centre that was generated in an expanding mercantile capitalist world-system within which were contending world views, practices, and processes.Footnote 53 In the sweep of Atlantic history the Scandinavian Atlantic is represented as a periphery in the Euro-Atlantic world-system.Footnote 54 In their dense particularities and logics of interaction the Scandinavian Atlantic and Atlantic West Africa constituted equivalent, entangled, and variegated spaces.Footnote 55 According to different estimates, Danish-Norwegian slaving ships transported between 110,000 and 120,000 captive bodies to the Caribbean.Footnote 56 In contrast to the Swedish trading company, Danish-Norwegian trading companies' commercial transactions in Atlantic West African ports had a continuous presence lasting nearly two centuries. Sweden supplied most of the iron exported to West Africa in the slave trade era while Copenhagen, as the dominant supplier of sugar for Northern Europe, was “an entrepôt for colonial goods.”Footnote 57 It has been said that sugar and slaves financed Danish-Norwegian modernization and industrialization and hence they account for, at least in part, the transition from feudalism to capitalism.Footnote 58 The dimensions of the companies' transactions comprised commercial transactions and political negotiations as well as cultural, social, and ideological matters.Footnote 59
The entangled spaces of the Scandinavian Atlantic and Atlantic West Africa and the latter's sites of mediation can be gleaned from Paul Lovejoy's generalizing assessment of transatlantic slave trade dynamics and Western African history. His argument is that West Africa's entangled history incorporated cultural, social, institutional, and ideological features, such as Christian conversion, churches, schools, and literacy in European languages, thus placing West Africa in the mainstream of Atlantic world history.Footnote 60 This interpretive account illustrates the historical agency of Atlantic West African ruling and dominant classes in their global interactions. At the same time, it provides a wider interpretive frame with respect to any assessment of the transactions and negotiations of Danish-Norwegian chartered companies with authority figures and institutions in Lower Guinea world ports.
Conclusion
The conversions and multilingual textual practices of Damma/Marotta/Madlena and Protten are construed in this study as a new manifestation and reworking of long-established and elaborate cultural-intellectual traditions of Great Popo and Accra-Osu. West Africa's sites of mediation open up the symbolic connection between the texts of Damma/Marotta/Madlena and the texts of Protten. Their texts are not simply a transhistorical source of particular kinds of information but can contribute to other levels of historiography—social and cultural history, shared or entangled history, intellectual history, and so on. Their texts are also indicative of another phenomenon, namely that the two Pietists maintained multiple, contingent identities that resonated at local and translocal levels of interaction. Hence, the texts are considered as inscribed in two intersecting temporalities, the long durée of Atlantic West African history and l'histoire événementielle of the Scandinavian Atlantic–Atlantic West African encounter, and in multiple cartographies of experience and struggle.
In the context of an imperial and mercantilist Scandinavian Atlantic Damma/Marotta/Madlena was active as a freed and defiant cultural entrepreneur in a plantation-based settler colony, seeking through collective struggle to create a public and institutional space, namely a church and a school on St. Thomas, for alienated and dispossessed Pietist converts. The purpose was to make a liveable society with the right to have a place of worship and a place of learning, which were also spaces of sanctity and sanctuary. The concrete political strategy to achieve this objective was to write petitions to the Danish-Norwegian royal family. Through their petitions St. Thomas's Pietist converts centrally positioned themselves in the Danish-Norwegian colonial-mercantilist enterprise and in the Moravian church's global discourse. One might venture that Damma/Marotta/Madlena sought to create an institutional relationship in order to empower certain ideas, beliefs, and practices among Pietist labourers, thereby activating in some fashion the principles of asuwada. Together with her coreligionists, she conceived of her social relationship to a transindividual reality in terms of a church- and school-based Pietist congregation. In this regard, the Pietists' marronage of the soul, a social and political collective effort, was to replace the escaped slaves' marronage of the body, that is, escaping a St. Thomas plantation through flight, a largely individual enterprise.
Protten can be situated as a cultural entrepreneur in the world-port environments of Lower Guinea. As a salaried and propertied employee of Danish-Norwegian trading companies, he was engaged in a personal struggle of righteous redemption. He was not a critic of enslavement and chattel slavery in any direct or confrontational way. Rather, he was a moral critic of his own wayward behaviour and spiritual shortcomings. Expressed in the Christo-centric language of Pietism, his politics of the personal can nevertheless be said to work within the achieved status of his patrimony and matrilineal-kin, whose history and cultural, social, and symbolic capital were linked to commerce, crafts, and governing, on the one hand, and the Kpele ceremonialism and modes of thought, on the other. Given this legacy, Protten was committed to a problematic relationship to dominant Danish-Norwegian categories of identity.
Thus we see how through an investigation of the worldliness of the multilingual writings of two West African Pietists, aspects of the entangled histories of the Scandinavian Atlantic and Atlantic West African are made visible.
