Notes

¹A few Germans did take part in the slave trade during this time. For a short period the Great Elector, Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg, planned to make Prussia a sea power and to this end instigated a plan to participate in the slave trade on the Guinea coast. The trading company he founded in 1679 failed, however, because the lack of colonies made it difficult to turn a profit. After enduring heavy financial losses for a number of years the company was sold to Dutch interests in 1698. Also, some Germans did sail on Dutch and Danish slave ships. See Albert Hüne, Vollständige historisch-philosophische Darstellung aller Veränderungen des Negersklavenhandels von dessen Ursprüngen an bis zu seiner gänzlichen Aufhebung (Göttingen, 1820), 1:421-30; and Catharina Lüden, Sklavenfahrt mit Seeleuten aus Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg und Lübeck im 18. Jahrhundert (Heide, 1983).

² Most recently, Peabody, Gerzina, Myers, and Blakely studied race relations between black and white people in these two countries within the framework of slavery. See Sue Peabody, "There Are No Slaves in France": The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (New York, 1996); Gretchen Gerzina, Black London: Life Before Emancipation (New Brunswick, N.J., 1995); Norma Myers, Reconstructing the Black Past: Blacks in Britain, 1780-1830 (London, 1996); Alison Blakely, Blacks in the Dutch World: The Evolution of Racial Imagery in a Modern Society (Bloomington, Ind., 1993).

³ See Peter Martin, Schwarze Teufel, edle Mohren: Afrikaner in Bewußtsein und Geschichte der Deutschen (Hamburg, 1993). This book provides insight into early modern German attitudes toward blacks, gives an overview of the sources available, and is the only monograph to date dealing with the African presence in early modern Germany. Additionally, two articles give a first insight into the living conditions of Africans in two eighteenth-century German residence towns: See Ingeborg Kittel, "Mohren als Hofbediente und Soldaten im Herzogtum Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel," Braunschweigisches Jahrbuch 46 (1965): 78-103; Wolfgang Schäfer, "Von 'Kammermohren,' 'Mohren'-Tambouren und 'Ost-Indianern': Anmerkungen zu Existenzbedingungen und Lebensformen einer Minderheit im 18. Jahrhundert unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Residenzstadt Kassel," Hessische Blätter für Volks- und Kulturforschung 23 (1988): 35-79.

⁴ A research project at Harvard University, "The Image of the Black in Western Art," analyzes the presence of black people in works of art (published in a series of books with the same name) and has an extensive collection of references to artworks throughout the world, including Europe and Germany.

⁵ See Uta Sadji, Der Mohr auf der deutschen Bühne des 18. Jahrhunderts (Anif, 1992).

⁶ Legally, however, blacks in Germany could find themselves in an ambiguous position. The lack of legal regulations in the German territories could serve as a disadvantage to Africans, who could not use the courts to defend themselves, as they could in England and France. For example, when a black man, who was bought in Copenhagen, instituted proceedings for his freedom in the Prussian courts in 1780 - a unique case - the obviously helpless court referred to the "natural law" to possess property and rejected his case. See Martin, Schwarze Teufel, edle Mohren, 133-4. On the situation of blacks in early modern England and France, see Gerzina, Black London, and Peabody, There Are No Slaves in France.

⁷ For example, a thirty-year-old black man named Ludwig Wallis was a Presbyterian when he joined Brunswick troops in America in 1781. He died three years later in Brunswick. See Kittel, "Mohren als Hofbediente und Soldaten," 94.

⁸ Less than a third of the blacks registered in France in the second half of the eighteenth century were baptized. See Peabody, There Are No Slaves in France, 82.

⁹ Soemmerring published his research findings in 1784 in a book called Über die körperliche Verschiedenheit des Mohren vom Europäer (On the Physical Difference between the Moor and the European). Eighteenth-century German texts refer to black peoples in different, often not clearly defined terms: Contemporaries usually referred to black persons as Mohren, but this word was also used as a catch-all concept for non-white, non-Christians (Chinese, Indians et al.). Further, they also began using the term Neger, from the French nègre, which had specific reference to the inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa. All this reflects the general problem in eighteenth-century Germany of identifying and classifying non-European peoples. On the eighteenth-century etymology of the term Mohren, see Sander L. Gilman, On Blackness Without Blacks: Essays on the Image of the Black in Germany (Boston, 1982), xii.

¹⁰ See, e.g., Peabody, There Are No Slaves in France, 8, or Seymour Drescher, "The Ending of the Slave Trade and the Evolution of European Scientific Racism," in Joseph E. Inkori and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe (Durham, N.C., 1992), 362.

¹¹ John C. Greene argued that the main interest of the Americans on anthropological questions before 1800 was religiously motivated, in order to use the Bible to justify slavery. He therefore refers to Thomas Jefferson's "Notes on Virginia," the "History of Jamaica" by Edward Long (republished in the United States in 1788), the work of Benjamin Rush from 1792, and to professor of anatomy John Augustine Smith«s work from 1808. See John C. Greene, "The American Debate on the Negro«s Place in Nature, 1780-1815," Journal of the History of Ideas 15 (1954): 384-96.