Short Essay Three

Characterizing Nineteenth-Century European Attitudes Towards Africans

            A series of vital social, economic, and political changes that occurred between 1790 and 1875 characterize Europe’s entrance into the modern world. Following the decline of the slave trade in the late eighteenth century, the African continent became the center of the imperial race between competing European nations. As the African presence in European culture grew, European attitudes towards African shifted to focus on a ‘civilizing mission,’ based on the ideology of the superiority of European civilization on a global scale. Changing intellectual tides motivated Europeans to look to empirical evidence of the biological inferiority of Africans in order to justify colonial operations. European-educated African intellectuals embraced the idea of westernization as a way to promote their own interests and improve the lives of colonial Africans. The nineteenth century was a pivotal period for the relationship between Europe and Africa; it would take a Great War to alter the attitudes formed during this time.

            Between the eve of the French Revolution in 1790 and the start of the “Partition of Africa” in 1875, the consciousness of Europeans changed dramatically. This was the greatest period of capital accumulation in Europe; wealth garnered from the slave trade fueled the development of Industry, placing an enormous amount of wealth at the fingertips of European governments and investors. “Larger populations with more money to spend meant a steady growth in demand for the products of other continents, products that included the cotton of Egypt, the palm oil of West Africa, the ivory of tropical Africa and the wool of South Africa.”[1] In addition, this period experienced key changes in the political structure of Europe. New notions of the modern, unified European nation created a newly important competition in the creation of world empires. Because of the decline of the slave trade and changing intellectual tides, European ideas about Africans were no longer derived from slave owners, but from the scientific investigators who penetrated the continent seeking to classify and map out the inner parts of Africa. By the late 1800s, European explorers were most concerned with spreading European influence, “Their work was nationalistic, concerned to thwart the activities of other European explorers in a developing scramble for possession.”[2] These forces stimulated the development of the ‘civilizing mission’, which added new dynamics to the relationship between Europe and Africa.

            The change in European attitudes towards Africans in the nineteenth century is characterized by the ‘civilizing mission’ ideology. Since European colonizers had gained political control over Africa, their chief concern became the spread of Western civilization in colonized areas: “It was incumbent upon the Western colonizers to replace corrupt and wasteful indigenous regimes with honest and efficient bureaucracies, to reorganize the societies of subjugated peoples in ways the Europeans deemed more rational and more nurturing of individual initiative and enterprise, and to restructure the physical environment of colonized lands in order to bring them into line with European conceptions of time and space.”[3] The events of the past centuries had inspired confidence in European prosperity, technology, and culture. “The overwhelming majority of thinkers and political leaders who concerned themselves with colonial issues had little doubt that the scientific and industrial revolutions had elevated Western societies far above all others in the understanding and mastery of the material world.”[4] The combination of anxiety associated with the consciousness of superiority and the importance of seeking non-religious justification of European subjugation of other races brought the movement of scientific racism to the fore, significantly among members of the British Anthropological Institute: "The combination of these elitist assumptions with a strong orientation toward medicine and natural science makes it hardly surprising that these late-Victorian members of the Institute, a significant number of whom had military or colonial connections, should look for biological explanations for the geopolitical reality of the expansion of European dominion over nonwhite peoples."[5] The ‘civilizing mission’ is characterized by scientific justification of the superiority of the European race and the economic and political confidence in Western civilization.            

            Although African intellectuals were alienated by their awareness of white hypocrisy, they embraced the possibility of introducing European advanced to Africa in order to promote their own interests. African intellectuals educated in Europe believed that in order to revive the continent that had been shattered by the slave trade, it would be essential to employ the assistance of Western technologies and sensibilities.[6] Before World War I, the African response to the European ‘civilizing mission’ was “highly essentialist, mainly reactive rather than proactive, and framed by Western gauges of human achievement and worth.[7] This was partially because "African professionals and intellectuals tended to have fewer avenues of access to institutions of higher learning in Europe and fewer opportunities for artistic and literary collaboration."[8] However, African students in Europe were a key part of the response during this time period. They helped organize pan-African groups that connected over shared difficulties presented by colonial life. “Attempts by Africans and others of African descent to organize to combat the consequences of colonialism and racism had come to the attention of the British government and other interested parties… From this time on, more concerted efforts were made by defenders of the empire to control and monitor the activities of African students."[9] Only after World War I had ended were African groups able to coalesce into a coherent movement against civilizing mission ideology.

            The political and economic changes sustained by Europe between 1790 and 1875 resulted in a 'civilizing mission' ideology. This ideology of ultimate European superiority, fueled by changing intellectual tides that increased the importance of scientific evidence, marked a shift in European attitudes toward Africa from one dictated by the slave trade to one dictated by competition between European imperial powers. The response by African intellectuals to this shift in attitude was characterized by their inability to overcome the power of the civilizing mission, leading them to embrace Westernization as the essential means to improve colonial life in the African continent.

Bibliography

Adas, Michael. “Contested Hegemony: The Great War and the Afro-Asian Assault on the             Civilizing Mission Ideology.” Journal of World History, 15:1 (2004): 31-63.

Adi, Hakim. “Pan-Africanism and West African Nationalism in Britain.” African Studies Review             43:1 (2000): 69-82.

Hallett, Robin. “Changing European Attitudes to Africa.” In The Cambridge History of Africa             Vol 5.: From c. 1790 to c. 1870, edited by John E. Flint. Cambridge Histories Online:             Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Lorimer, Douglas. “Theoretical Racism in Late-Victorian Anthropology, 1870-1900.” Victorian             Studies, 31:3 (1988): 405-430.

McKenzie, J.M. Partition of Africa, 1800-1900: And European Imperialism in the Nineteenth             Century. London: Routledge, 1983.

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[1] Robin Halett, “Changing European Attitudes to Africa.” In The Cambridge History of Africa Vol 5.: From c. 1790 to c. 1870, edited by John E. Flint (Cambridge Histories Online: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 461.

[2] J.M. MacKenzie, Partition of Africa, 1800-1900: And European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1983), 13-14.

[3] Michael Adas, “Contested Hegemony: The Great War and the Afro-Asian Assault on the Civilizing Mission Ideology,” Journal of World History, 15:1 (2004): 36.

[4] Ibid. 36.

[5] Douglas Lorimer, “Theoretical Racism in Late-Victorian Anthropology, 1870-1900.” Victorian Studies, 31:3 (1988): 408.

[6] Ibid. 39.

[7] Ibid. 49.

[8] Ibid. 56.

[9] Hakim Adi, “Pan-Africanism and West African Nationalism in Britain.” African Studies Review 43:1 (2000): 74.

Short Essay Two

Assimilation vs. Racism: Christianity and the Social Status of Africans in Early Modern Europe

            A crucial epoch in the history of Africans in Europe was the explosion of the Atlantic slave trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The growing African presence in European society was confronted with the inherent racism of the white elite classes. A key part of African assimilation was the embrace of Christianity by the black population. Christianity fostered the development of an international African identity, especially among seafaring blacks, because it allowed Africans uprooted from their various homes to connect to one another. But even as Africans became increasingly assimilated to European religion and custom, racial divides between elite whites and subservient blacks dictated the Africans’ social status to a far more definite degree. However, Christianity played a key role in the social movement for the abolition of slavery; Christian groups at the fringe of English Protestantism who had garnered significant wealth in Atlantic trade and influence in the New World led the movement, reinvigorating the influence of Christians over state policy after centuries of decline. Christianity did little to improve the subservient social status of Africans in a society overcome with race divisions, but it did help facilitate the development of an international African consciousness and was the key force behind the abolitionist movement.

            The scholarship of James Walvin, Pierre Boulle, and Sue Peabody do not reflect specifically on Africans and Christianity in early modern European life, but their work does provide key insights into the social dynamics of the slave trade and the inherent racism in state policy that most significantly dictated the social status of Africans. By emphasizing the importance of European consumption patterns and the labor market forces in Africa and Europe, including the comparative advantages of Africans as opposed to Indians in both plantation and domestic work, Walvin demonstrates a general image of the social dynamics created by the African presence in both Europe and in the New World. Pierre Boulle helps characterize the social status of Africans in France in terms of state policy. Primarily concerned with what the debate over the regulation of slavery in France reveals about the inner workings of the French government in the decades leading up to the Revolution, Boulle shows how the racism of ruling elites in France forced blacks into a subservient social status despite the rhetoric of liberty and equality: “The conflict between the principles of liberty and property, which had impeded a clear answer to the status of nonwhite residents in France during the ancien regime, would result in delaying action during the Revolution.”[1] Sue Peabody’s work is chiefly concerned with what the legal debate over the existence of slavery on French soil reveals about early modern race relations. Focusing on 18^th century court cases concerning slave status and race in France, Peabody highlights an emerging emphasis on racial distinctions in French society; "In 1759 the Parlement of Paris agreed to hear the appeal of a master, Brignon, whose slave, Francisque, had been freed by a lower court. The case marks a transition in French legal thought from the first had of the eighteenth century, when there was little differentiation between race and slave status, and the second half of the eighteenth century, when race alone because the basis for many laws."[2]

            In contrast, the writings of Olaudah Equiano, and the scholarship of historians Gretchen Gerzina, Christopher Brown and Nicolas Hudson, provide key information about the importance of Christianity in defining the social status of Africans, showing how it shaped African consciousness and was responsible for the abolitionist movement. Olaudah Equiano demonstrates an African’s take on the experience of living in Europe, pointing to the challenge faced by many to reconcile an assimilated (Christian) European identity with an African identity. As demonstrated in his autobiography, Equiano’s relationship with other Africans stems from a mediated identity based upon European ideas of nation and culture, shedding light on the African consciousness. Speaking of his shipmate and interpreter Dick, Equiano writes, “From what I could understand by him of this God, and in seeing these white people did not sell one another as we did, I was much pleased; and in this I thought they were much happier than we Africans.”[3] Gretchen Gerzina notes the importance of mobility in shaping the African consciousness as expressed through the writings of black seafarers, specifically Olaudah Equiano, Paul Cuffe, and Nancy Gardner Prince. More importantly, she notes how the three authors have Protestant Christianity in common, which allowed them to mutually connect despite being uprooted from their homeland: "All of these writers were African born and tried to reconcile their enslaved status with the freedom conferred by a Christianity they discovered only because they had been forced to travel from their place of birth, thereby exchanging their birth home for a spiritual one."[4] Christopher Brown reflects on how the abolitionist movement reignited the power of Christianity over European society after centuries of decline. He writes, “An attack on slavery, all understood, entailed also an attack on private property and the social order. The promotion of Christianity, by contrast, seemed to offer the most promising way to sanctify human bondage and restrain its worst abuses without fomenting revolutionary change."[5] He notes that the margins of British Protestantism are chiefly responsible for promoting Abolitionism, particularly the prosperous groups like the Quakers who had gained substantial wealth and influence in the New World. Finally, Nicolas Hudson provides a conservative take on the origins of abolitionism, explaining that English abolitionist leaders were part of an elite class that identified with Africans as being victims of the same oppressors (i.e. the tyrannical English monarchy). He notes the divergence between the English nobility and the new wealth of Atlantic merchants and plantation owners, and asserts that abolitionism was a reaction to the growth of power and authority of the mercantile classes, and concerned the impact of slavery (new money) on an old society, using the examples of France and England. Together, these works display the connection between Christianity and social status in early modern England, showing that although Christianity fostered the development of an international African consciousness and fueled abolitionism, the social status of Africans was ultimately subject to the racism of the elite white ruling classes.

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[1] Pierre H. Boulle, “Racial Purity or Legal Clarity? The Status of Black Residents in Eighteenth-Century France,” The Journal of The Historical Society, 1:1 (2006): 40.

[2] Sue Peabody, “Race, Slavery and the Law in Early Modern France,” Historian 56:3 (1994): 505.

[3] Olaudah Equiano, Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano: Or Gustavus Vassa, The African (New York: Random House, 2004), 50.

[4] Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, "Freedom of Movement in the Early Black Atlantic," South Atlantic Quarterly, 100:1 (2001): 43.

[5] Christopher Leslie Brown, “Christianity and the Campaign Against Slavery and the Slave Trade,” In The Cambridge History of Christianity Vol. 7: Enlightenment, Revolution and Reawakening, ed. Margaret M. Mitchell and Frances M. Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 521.

Short Essay One

Characteristically ‘Other’: The Changing Image of the African in Europe, 1400-1600

            The years 1400-1600 C.E. marked a rise in European imperialism and capitalist competition between major powers on the economic frontier of the New World. Before the early modern period, Europeans new little about the African continent, the dominant conception of the faraway land being “that of a hot, rainy, forested continent with exotic fauna and black people.”[1] Initially, European colonizers respected the autonomy of West African states and sought diplomatic relationships with African rulers, but it would prove impossible to reconcile the fundamental differences in social custom to maintain diplomacy, and so began the decline of the image of the African in European society. As transatlantic trade became central to political and economic competition, Africans were increasingly valuable commodities. The fundamental differences in physical appearance and cultural practices forced the growing African population of Europe to occupy a marginalized echelon of society, whose permanent presence and miscegenation did little to improve their public image. The explosion of the slave trade during this period shifted attitudes towards Africa from exotic curiosity to fear and brutal suppression.[2] Though the image of the African evolved differently in Mediterranean Europe and Northern Europe, the rampant dehumanization and commodification of Africans during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries can be identified as a shared trend. By the end of this 200-year period, the opportunities of the New World made possible by a dependence on slaves ushered in the era of the modern European empire.

             The experiences of the African slave in the Iberian Peninsula and other parts of Mediterranean Europe were decidedly different from those of Northern Europe. The labor shortage resulting from the Black Death’s devastation of the European population forced previous feudal structures to break down, and landholders seeking alternatives to negotiating with liberated serfs increased demand for slave labor. Diplomacy in the fifteenth century between the Portuguese and West African states is evidence of the initial exoticism in the European idea of Africa; the Portuguese respected the autonomy of West African rulers and on the outset, treated the Africans as any other foreign nation, but the insurmountable cultural differences eventually led Portugal to abandon diplomacy for violence, resulting in the capture of thousands of West African villagers for slave labor. As the presence of Africans in Europe became a permanent fixture, art and the theater were significant means of communicating matters of public opinion. In many productions, “The Black was portrayed as a buffoon during this period when his presence, at its peak, often threatened the economic and social order with his availability as a worker in areas such as shipbuilding, craftsmanship and farming.”[3] By the 17^th century, the major minority groups in Spain – the Jews, Moors, and the Blacks – “had only one raison d’etre, assimilation.”[4] But compared to Northern and Western Europe, Iberia’s pioneering role as the first African colonizers allowed more opportunities for slaves to earn freedom: “Well-worn avenues to freedom within Iberian religious and legal traditions offered greater hope for personal liberty than anything the English had to offer.”[5]  Aside from this divergence however, it is clear that Northern and Southern Europe alike began to fear and despise the black European population, leading to further objectification and dehumanization of Africans in the minds of Europeans.

            In England and other parts of Northern Europe with a similar social structure, the image of Africans from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries was dominated by differences in skin color and culture. To illustrate, “The sub-Saharan Africans ‘black’ skin and drastically unfamiliar customs and convictions, the evidence suggests, set them apart in English eyes and imaginations as a special category of humankind.”[6] During the fifteenth century, the explorers who served as sources of information about Africa had the primary goal of entertainment as opposed to truth, emphasizing Africa’s exoticism and fantastical allure, but “By gradual but increasing contrast, the secular-minded explorers who succeeded them in the last quarter of the sixteenth century as England’s chief sources of geographical information were more ethnographic, more precise, and generally more truthful.”[7] Despite this step towards truthful understanding of the continent, the second half of the sixteenth century saw an increase in negative representations of sub-Saharan Africans in Northern and Western European culture as well as Southern.[8] By the first decade of the seventeenth century, significantly more reliable information about Africa was available, and the proliferation of the slave population in England and increase in cultural references to Africans was important: “After centuries of relative ethnic isolation English men and women were jolted by sudden exposure, in print and in person, to people remarkably different from themselves.”[9] The image of the African in Northern and Western Europe was ultimately tainted by an intrinsic prejudice about that which was characteristically ‘other.’

             The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries experienced significant change in the European perception of Africans, from exotic fantasy to important economic tool. The treatment of Africans was an important element in relations between competing European powers. In England for example, “The circumstances of an Atlantic world in which either holding Africans in bondage or liberating them from slavery could be leverage to enhance English power vis-à-vis Spain was at the heart of how Englishmen approached Africans in the late sixteenth century.”[10] But more importantly, this was the source of widespread dehumanization in the slave trade, and by the onset of the seventeenth century, Africans were a measurably valuable commodity; “To the Portuguese, Dutch, and Spanish in the early seventeenth century, an African became a ‘piece’, measurable in practically the same way as a piece of cloth.”[11] In sum, although Northern and Southern European powers held different positions of power in the Atlantic world, they undoubtedly viewed the people and natural resources offered by Africa through the same exploitative lens.[12]

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[1] Walter Rodney, “Africa in Europe and the Americas,” in The Cambridge History of Africa Vol. 4: From c. 1600 to 1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 578-579.

[2] Michael Guasco, “Free from the Tyrannous Spanyard? Englishmen and Africans in Spain’s Atlantic World,” Slavery and Abolition 29.1 (2008): 13.

[3] Annette Ivory, “Juan Latino: The Struggle of Blacks, Jews, and Moors in Golden Age Spain,” Hispania 62.4 (1979): 617.

[4] Ibid, 613.

[5] Michael Guasco, “Free from the Tyrannous Spanyard? Englishmen and Africans in Spain’s Atlantic World,” 13.

[6] Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan, “Elizabethan Representations of Sub-Saharan Africans,” The William and Mary Quarterly 54.1 (199): 21.

[7] Ibid, 24.

[8] Ibid, 44.

[9] Ibid, 29.

[10] Michael Guasco, “Free from the Tyrannous Spanyard? Englishmen and Africans in Spain’s Atlantic World,” 14.

[11] Walter Rodney, “Africa in Europe and the Americas,” 589.

[12] Michael Guasco, “Free from the Tyrannous Spanyard? Englishmen and Africans in Spain’s Atlantic World,” 14.

First Post

I am Lucie Anselin, a senior studying History and Geography. I've had coursework in different areas of European History, and especially enjoyed studying the French Revolution and modern French history. I am excited to learn more about the relationship between European and African people and nations, as well as capping off my history degree upon completion of this course!