Pernille Ipsen. Daughters of the Trade

Pernille Ipsen’s Daughters of the Trade: Atlantic Slavers and Interracial Marriage on the Gold Coast addresses the making of a mixed-race community in the Gold Coast during the period of the Atlantic slave trade, and the significance of this community for our understandings of the conduct of the slave trade and transformations in racial thought in the Atlantic world. The book focuses on the Ga stronghold of Osu and the adjoining Danish fort of Christiansborg, which Denmark took over from Sweden in the mid-seventeenth century. From the beginning, Danish traders who were strangers to the region would form households or cassare with women from prominent Ga families as a strategy for improving their survival rates on the coast and their success rates in the Atlantic trade. The unions and households that were formed by cassare were initially organized in Ga fashion and involved Ga women, but shifted over time to incorporate European forms of marriage and family as well, and to feature the involvement of mixed Ga-Danish women predominantly. The book explores how the making and evolution of this community shaped the accumulation of wealth by Ga-Danish women and their lineages; the transfer of economic, and later political, power in Osu from Ga elites to traders at the Christiansborg fort; and the hardening of racial hierarchies on the Gold Coast, which featured Europeans at the top, Africans in a subordinate position, and mixed-race people occupying an intermediate status. To quote Ipsen, the book shows how “the increasing strength of the European colonial system shaped individual lives and families of West African and European slave traders, and how the spatial organization and the material culture of these families shifted in a European direction” (2).

Archaeology · Atlantic World · Danish · Economic history · Ethnology · Gold coast · Political science · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies