Atlantic creoles

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The ethnic group of the Atlantic Creoles emerged in the 15th century together with the Portuguese-West African sea trade.

The collective term Atlantic Creoles (Engl .: Atlantic creoles ) is a mobile ethnically and culturally diverse group of socially and spatially, mostly of African descent women and men understood that from the 15th to the 19th century in the service of European trading companies the Atlantic traveled and the African, European and American coasts built many of their own settlements and trading bases.

This term was coined by the American historian Ira Berlin , who in his work on slavery in the United States describes how the first generations ( charter generations ) of slaves on the Atlantic Creoles under European colonial rule in the 17th century North American mainland were recruited.

History and culture

The origins of the Atlantic Creoles lie in the encounters between Africans and European - especially Portuguese , French and British - merchants who established trading establishments on the West African coast from the 15th century . There they found enterprising, well-traveled, knowledgeable and enterprising locals who worked for them as interpreters, negotiators and legal advisers on site or who went on board with them as seamen, supercargoers , servants or exotic "trophies". Because of their frequent contact with European seafarers and their high level of mobility, many of the Atlantic Creoles soon had European ancestors: a fact which indeed diminished their reputation among Europeans; as versatile experts in Atlantic trade, they were nevertheless indispensable for European trading companies. In many port cities in West Africa, Europe and the American double continent they set up settlements and bases in which they often traded on their own account. The largest Creole settlement in Europe was in Lisbon . The environment of the Atlantic Creoles was always multilingual; in addition to a variety of African languages they spoke European languages - especially Portuguese -, from which as working languages different based on the Portuguese Pidgin and finally complete creoles developed.

The Atlantic Creoles were familiar with slavery in two ways. First, many forms of slavery traditionally existed in West Africa itself, such as debt bondage and serfdom (see: Slavery within Sub-Saharan Africa ). Second, when Atlantic Creoles worked for European trading companies, they were often involved in their slave trade. Many kept their own slaves or even traded with them themselves.

In the 17th century, a large number of Atlantic Creoles came - more or less voluntarily - to the Chesapeake Bay region in the British province of Maryland , where the boundaries between wage labor, bondage and slavery were fluid at the time. The forms of slavery were generally milder there than later in the plantation economy of the American southern states. Atlantic Creoles who fell into slavery in the Chesapeake were able to carry out their own production and trading activities in addition to working for their employer, were knowledgeable and business-minded and were often released or could buy themselves out. Many Atlantic Creoles marriages and partnerships with European women and men in mainland North America, so that younger generations were more likely to have mixed ancestors than older ones. Others also had Caribbean ancestors.

Ira Berlin describes these generations of North American slaves as Charter Generations (German: "founding generations ") and distinguishes them from later generations such as the plantation generations, the "revolutionary generations" of the American independence movement and the "wandering generations" of the 19th Century.

See also

literature

  • Ira Berlin: Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America , Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998
  • Ira Berlin: Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves , Cambridge, London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003, ISBN 0-674-01061-2
  • Trevor Burnard: Creole Gentlemen: The Maryland Elite, 1691-1776 , Routledge, 2002, ISBN 0415931746
  • Michael Zeuske: "Atlantic, slaves and slavery - elements of a new global history", in: Yearbook for the history of European expansion 6 (2006), pp. 9–44
  • Michael Zeuske: Slaves and Slavery in the Worlds of the Atlantic, 1400-1940. Outlines, beginnings, actors, fields of comparison and bibliographies , Münster / Hamburg / London: LIT Verlag, 2006 (slavery and post-emancipation, ed. Michael Zeuske, vol. 1), ISBN 3-8258-7840-6
  • Linda M. Heywood, John K. Thornton: Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585-1660 , Cambridge University Press, 2007, ISBN 0521779227
  • Mikael Parkvall: Out of Africa: African Influences in Atlantic Creoles , Battlebridge Publications, 2002, ISBN 1903292050

Web links

All listed websites are in English: