Germany's Transatlantic Slave Trade...

5fish

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Germany also played its role in the Transatlantic slave trade too...


snip... St Thomas an American territory today...

It all started in 1682, with the founding of the African Company by the grand elector of Brandenburg-Prussia, Frederick William. Determined to rival Europe’s great sea powers, he ordered the establishment of a fort on the coast of present-day Ghana, to be named Groß Friedrichsburg. The fort was designed to serve as a point of departure for the German slave trade. In the decades that followed, German slave ships, such as the Friedrich III, transported thousands of African slaves overseas. Many of them ended up on the slave market of St. Thomas, in the Virgin Islands, over which Prussia gained control from Denmark in 1685. For some time, St. Thomas had the dubious distinction of being the most important slave market in the world.

snip...

German merchants were an intricate part of the slave trade, particularly in France. Trading German linen fabrics for slaves in West Africa, who then were shipped overseas to the sugar plantations in Central and South America, they made a fortune. Some of them founded their own shipping lines devoted to the slave trade and used to supply the French overseas possessions with slave labor. One of the major destinations was present-day Haiti, which at the time was the source of three-quarters of the world’s sugar output.

snip...

Other German merchants were based in London from where they contributed, directly or indirectly, to the slave trade. One of the best-known merchants was Heinrich Karl von Schimmelmann from Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in the east of Germany. Von Schimmelmann gained his fortune from his possessions on the Danish Virgin Islands, based on the forced labor of more than a thousand slaves. In his later life, von Schimmelmann settled in Wandsbek, a faubourg of Hamburg. There he quickly acquired a reputation as a major benefactor of the community. In 2006, Wandsbek’s administration commissioned a bust in his honor. Two years later, following protests from antiracist activists who doused the bust with red paint, the new red-Green administration ordered its removal.
 

5fish

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Here a bio on a German Slave Trader... here a link to Black People in German over a 1000 years...


snip...

DANIEL BOTEFEUR, A GERMAN SLAVE TRADER (1811)
Although the involvement of German states in the slave trade was quite limited relative to the involvement of the Portuguese, Spanish, Danish, Dutch, French, or the British, nevertheless many German trading houses had connections to transatlantic commerce and the slave trade. The dynastic connection between Great Britain and Hannover through the eighteenth and early nineteenth century provided a direct route for Germans to participate in human trafficking. One such German was the Hanoverian doctor Daniel Botefeur (a.k.a. Botifeur), and thanks to painstaking research by the scholar Michael Zeuske we can reconstruct his activities. Sometime around 1800 he sold his services to the notorious British slaving fortress at Bunce Island in today’s Sierra Leone and soon was put in charge of subsidiary station of his own. From this start he began to amass the money needed to start financing his own ships and trading missions; he bought slaves from slave merchants in West and Central Africa and transported them to buyers in Cuba, Florida, South Carolina, and beyond. When the British and Americans officially ended their participation in the slave trade in 1807/08 , Botefeur was in a good position to fill in the gap they left behind. He continued financing ships that dodged the Royal Navy’s West African Squadron up until his death in Charleston in 1828.
Botefeur settled down in Havana, where his extraordinary wealth allowed him to marry well above his station into a prominent Cuban aristocratic family. He and his Cuban wife María had five children; Botefeur also had at least six African daughters whom he had earlier sent to missionary schools in West Africa. Like others who financed and profited from slavery around the Atlantic, he re-invested his capital, in his case into two plantations (named “Gratitud” and “Enrique”) feeding the international thirst for coffee after the Napoleonic wars. At his death, he owned 221 men, women, and children who worked on his plantations and eight young people who worked in his richly outfitted mansion.
In this 1811 entry from the diary of Captain Edward H. Columbine, British governor of Sierra Leone, we learn about the difficulties of intercepting slaving vessels, Botefeur’s notorious reputation, and the fortunate escape of some of his victims.
Jeff Bowersox

DEUTSCH
March 2.
During my absence, six natives had arrived in a ship’s boat, having escaped from that notorious villain & slave-dealer Botefeur; a German who has a sort of factory in the R. Pongo. He also has a brig on the Coast (which we have been in quest of) but he has eluded our search by hiding her in some of the innumerable branches of the Pongo & other rivers. Lately he has moved her near to Bissao, where he means to ship his wretched victims & proceed to the Havanna. Slaves in the usual course of barbarity being scarce, owing to the appearance which I have had the happiness of inflicting on the dealers; Botefeur to supply the deficiency, has thought proper to put all his domestic slaves into the chain, (a villainy which even African law does not admit) & amongst others was conveying these six young men to his brig. But they ran when the two white men in the boat near the Nunez & brought her hither. Allowing the white men to escape. I shall certainly afford the protection of the colony to these poor fellows.
 

5fish

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@rittmeister , you say small fry but the Germans run some of the biggest slave actions and a piece of African Coast was called Prussian Gold Coast...
 

5fish

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I found a book on the topic... link to the entire book review...


1618443148627.png

snip...

The manufacture of commodities that were principal trade goods in Africa – goods with which Europeans paid African traders for the enslaved men, women and children – was an important element of many regional economies well away from the principal port cities, and some branches specialised in the African markets. Iron bars and ironware travelled from the Baltic to Western Europe’s ports engaged in the African trade. Glass beads were exported from Bohemia (the Czech lands), and the higher quality Venetian products attracted Liverpool merchants to set up branch offices in Italy to secure their supply. The Swiss family firm Burckhardt/Bourcard began by supplying cotton cloth for the slave trade and importing slave-produced luxury goods, but later moved into equipping its own slave ships. Textile plants in the Wupper Valley in western Germany and the handlooms of Eastern Prussia provided linens of varying quality for use on the slave plantations, though because they were shipped through English and Dutch ports their German origins have often been obscured. And the trading networks established in the context of the slave economy supported German export projects even after the trade was abolished, as German firms continued to trade into territories – Brazil and the Caribbean – where slavery persisted until the late 19th century.

snip...

Germans in particular were keen observers of the Atlantic slave economy, and they had their own perspective on international debates about the trade and its abolition. At the beginnings of the trade, the rulers of Brandenburg Prussia had some hopes of buying into it, establishing a slave fort on the Gold Coast between 1682 and 1720. One of the key documents of this episode is the diary of a ship’s barber, Johann Peter Oettinger, who sailed on slaving expeditions. He chose to make no comment about the brutalities that he witnessed and recorded. Characteristically, though, when the diaries were published for German readers 200 years later, they were given a moralising spin; by the 1880s, Germany was at the forefront of the Scramble for Africa, justifying colonisation in the name of suppressing the internal slave trade. Before that, and once the German states were no longer involved in the slave trade, German-speaking scientists and administrators placed themselves in the service of those states that were. Ernst Schimmelmann, for example, whose family had one foot in Hamburg and one in Copenhagen, was a plantation owner and manager of the Swedish state-owned slaving company, but also responsible for the abolition of the Danish slave trade in 1792. And initiatives for the post-abolition exploitation of tropical territories relied on the work of German scientists in service to the Danish state like the botanist Julius von Rohr.

snip...

Scholarly attention to the German case is also bringing the Atlantic plantation economies into dialogue with the practices of unfree labour that existed in German Central Europe at the same time.
 

5fish

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Ah,,, @rittmeister and @Wehrkraftzersetzer so while the Germans were profiting from the African Slave trade, back home too. Germany had serfs up and into the 19th century... We talk about the Russians...


snip...

This pattern applied in Central and Eastern European countries, including Prussia (Prussian Ordinances of 1525), Austria, Hungary (laws of the late 15th and early 16th centuries), the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (szlachta privileges of the early 16th century) and the Russian Empire (laws of the late 16th and first half of the 17th century). This also led to the slower industrial development and urbanisation of those regions. Generally, this process, referred to[by whom?] as "second serfdom" or "export-led serfdom", persisted until the mid-19th century and became very repressive and substantially limited serfs' rights. Before the 1861 abolition of serfdom in Russia, a landowner's estate was often measured by the number of "souls" he owned, a practice made famous by Gogol's 1842 novel Dead Souls.

snip...

In German history the emancipation of the serfs came between 1770–1830, with the nobility in Schleswig being the first to agree to do so in 1797, followed by the signing of the royal and political leaders of Denmark and Germany in 1804.[8] Prussia abolished serfdom with the "October Edict" of 1807, which upgraded the personal legal status of the peasantry and gave them ownership of half or two-thirds of the lands they were working. The edict applied to all peasants whose holdings were above a certain size, and included both Crown lands and noble estates. The peasants were freed from the obligation of personal services to the lord and annual dues; in return landowners were given ownership of 1/3 to 1/2 of the land. The peasant owned and rented the lands that were deeded to the old owners. The other German states imitated Prussia after 1815.
[9]

This link list when European states ended serfdom...

 

5fish

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You know I found some dirt on some other Western nations and the slave trade... You had co- conspirators...
 

5fish

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I found German writers writing about Slavery in the 19th century... some parts of the article is in German click on the link...


snip... anti slavery...

The probably best-known traveler who brought factual details and judgmental evaluations about slavery to the general German public was the Prussian natural scientist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). His extensive travels throughout the Americas, where he observed slavery first hand, turned him into an outspoken opponent of the institution; the brutality on Cuban slave plantations he had observed during his visits to the island in 1800 and 1804 led him to declare that slavery is “possibly the greatest evil ever to have afflicted humanity” in his book Essai politique sur l’isle de Cuba in 1826.21 Humboldt’s clear antislavery stance and his meticulous thoughts on the economic and political necessity to abolish slavery resulted not only in a ban of the Spanish translation of this publication in colonial Cuba but – perhaps a less known fact in English-speaking countries – also turned him into a cause célèbre for American abolitionists when he criticized, for example, Massachusetts’ senator Daniel Webster’s support for the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.22 Humboldt’s popularity among opponents of slavery in the USA is attested to by numerous reports about him in antislavery newspapers.23 This popularity stems first and foremost from his protest against an 1856 translation of his essay on Cuba by John Sidney Trasher, a pro-slavery advocate and promoter of the annexation of Cuba. Despite the explicit critique of slavery inherent in the work, Trasher, in what he presented as merely an act of translation, omitted the chapter which contained most of Humboldt’s arguments against the slave economy from the Essay on the Island of Cuba and subsequently used Humboldt’s work as evidence for his pro-slavery agenda.24

snip...

The German reading public was rather presented with narratives like the one by Baron Albert von Sack (1757–1829). In his function as a chamberlain to the Prussian king, von Sack traveled to Suriname and North America from 1805 to 1807. As a scientist and explorer, his mission was to report not only about the flora and fauna of Suriname, but also about local customs and public life. In his narrative, he offers very detailed impressions of the slaves’ daily living conditions, which he mixes with his own personal thoughts about the institution of slavery. Addressing his own initial doubts about the institution, he is able to put any misgivings to rest by employing the argument of the good vs. the bad master. He writes:

"I confess, that the result of my observations has greatly diminished the prejudice which I brought with me from Europe, in respect to the situation of the negroes in the colonies. It must, indeed, be acknowledged, that the fate of the negro depends entirely on the temper and disposition of the master; for, while I have found the negroes happy on some plantations, I have at times, in my rural walks, seen, and still heard more of, the severe correction of others."

snip... German use von Sack pro master...

Von Sack’s account of slavery in Suriname and his repeated emphasis on the need for the “good master” would be taken up again by the German Empire’s colonial rhetoric at the end of the nineteenth century. These so-called first-hand impressions of slavery which did not condemn the institution of slavery as a moral wrong, but merely criticized “bad masters” helped lay the ideological groundwork for German colonial actions against people in Africa. The exploitation of the colonized was camouflaged with the discourse of offering a morally better institution: while the German colonial system still required a master, albeit a good one, because Africans would benefit or even prefer such a system, it also could bring civilization to the supposedly uncivilized Africans.


Snip... Von Sack is where Hitler starts... @rittmeister , @Wehrkraftzersetzer

Presentations like this testify to the fact that widespread German intellectual interest in slavery might have been concerned with the institution, but otherwise did not see any contradiction in simultaneously harboring racist attitudes towards black people that perceived them admittedly as fellow human beings, but nevertheless as inferior, helpless, childlike, and uncultured. These so-called first-hand impressions contributed to a strengthening of philosophical and pseudo-scientific reasoning regarding notions of racial superiority; German philosophers and natural scientists like Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), or Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) were able to build their racist theories on such historical “testimonial” material.

snip... travel writers ignore slavery...

Racist stereotypes and notions of white superiority were also disseminated by several popular German writers who brought the excitement of traveling to faraway places via fiction to the reading public at home. Balduin Möllhausen (1825–1905) and Friedrich Gerstäcker (1816–1872), to name just two prominent examples, were widely read, well-known authors. Möllhausen and Gerstäcker collected their material for their much-loved, self-styled ethnographic adventure novels during their own extensive travels to North America.

snip...

Even writers such as Mathilde Anneke (1817–1884), who became ardent critics of slavery when they emigrated to the USA, were not devoid of employing racial stereotypes. In her 1866 novella Uhland in Texas, for instance, she depicts German immigrants, due to their innate humanism, as model citizens of the New World, who inevitably also attack slavery as an inhuman institution and moral wrong. Although German American antislavery authors like Anneke at times come up with unconventional inclusions such as a Black Columbia or interracial marriage, her black characters, however, do not feature as prominently as her German immigrants, but function rather as supporting cast for the German lead characters. Her works, ultimately, serve to celebrate German moral, cultural, and intellectual superiority. Unfortunately, many of the assumptions and racial constructs delivered in these texts are still widely accepted in contemporary Germans’ attitudes towards people of African descent.33
 

rittmeister

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spiegel online has an article about it today (i haven't read it yet). it's behind a paywall but may be you can get in from your side of the pont. the picture is bollocks as these ships were used much later
 

Wehrkraftzersetzer

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well the bloody nobility sold their own people (to the English to fight Your lot) those merchands financed piracy - what do You expect?
 

O' Be Joyful

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Try looking up Leopold II who kept them in place, which does not excuse any of the other colonial powers or the good old USA.


 

Wehrkraftzersetzer

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Try looking up Leopold II who kept them in place, which does not excuse any of the other colonial powers or the good old USA.


Leopold II was one of the worst
 

5fish

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A German Fort in Ghana...


FORT GROSS-FRIEDRICHSBURG (PRINCESTOWN)
Brandenburg was a historic Electorate (Kurfürstentum) which formed the primary nucleus of the Prussian State. Under the reign of the Grand Elector Friedrich-Wilhelm von Brandenburg, was created an African Company, this company for about forty years ruled on several African forts at: Arguin, Takrama, Takoradi, Akwida (Ft. Dorothea), Whydah and Princestown or Poquefoe (Gross-Friedrichsburg). On New Year’s Day 1683 a Brandenburg expedition of two ships arrived on the Gold Coast and started to build a strong fort between Axim and Cape of Three Points, which was named Gross-Friedrichsburg. The fort was to be the headquarters of Brandenburg in Africa, it was garrisoned at the beginning by 91 European men and 130 Africans. The fort was a square shaped with four bastions. In the first 15 years the Brandenburgers developed well the trade with the Africans, but from 1700 trade began to decline. The Company was an ally of the African chief John Couny who was waging a war against the Dutch and the English. In 1720 a treaty was concluded between the King of Prussia and the Dutch, and all the African forts of Brandenburg were sold to the Hollanders, but the African ally of Prussia/Brandenburg, John Couny, refused to surrender Gross-Friedrichsburg. In 1725 the Dutch captured Fort Gross-Friedrichsburg and renamed it Fort Hollandia. The fort was abandoned by the Dutch in 1815.
 
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rittmeister

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they elected to have friedrich I as their head of state and this

Its architecture evokes images of Potsdam, Prussia’s garrison town outside Berlin.
is utter nonsense - potsdam is the traditional capital of prussia (berlin was only 2nd fiddle for most of the time)
 

Daring Drea

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is utter nonsense - potsdam is the traditional capital of prussia (berlin was only 2nd fiddle for most of the time)
Um, that depends how far you are going back in time.
Berlin was the city of Royal residence since 1701 and made Capital of Prussia in 1709 - even though I do acknowledge the fact that Potsdam was the cradle of what became Prussia, government-wise.

Snip-it_1631182921786.jpg
 

O' Be Joyful

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Um, that depends how far you are going back in time.
Berlin was the city of Royal residence since 1701 and made Capital of Prussia in 1709 - even though I do acknowledge the fact that Potsdam was the cradle of what became Prussia, government-wise.

View attachment 8243

Always trust a librarian to unstack it. :)

-------------------------------------------

1701 On January 18, 1701, Elector Friedrich III. in Königsberg to be crowned King Friedrich I in Prussia. Berlin becomes a royal capital.

1709 King Friedrich I decreed the union of the five cities of Berlin, Cölln, Friedrichswerder, Dorotheenstadt and Friedrichstadt as the capital and residence city of Berlin. The united city has 55,000 inhabitants.

1717 Compulsory schooling is introduced in Berlin. Their implementation will take a few decades.

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Let the Germanic history battle begin. :D
 
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