Ambiguous Passages: Non-Europeans Brought to Europe by the Moravian Brethren during the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Throughout the 18th century a number of unfree individuals was brought to Europe by members of the Moravian Church. Their places of origin were manifold; they came from the West Indies, from Suriname and Berbice, Western Africa, Greenland, North America, the tsarist Empire, Persia or from the Malabar Coast. Africans and creoles from the Danish Antilles were the most numerous group amongst them. Wherever these persons eventually ended up, be it the principalities of the Holy Roman Empire, in Denmark, England, or the Netherlands, as aliens they remained dependent on those who had brought them there. Their legal and social status was ambiguous; no matter whether they were slaves or freedmen, male or female, adults or children, servants or labourers, fully integrated into the religious and economic community or existing on its periphery. Despite their relative obscurity, the existence of this group of Non-Europeans is indicative of the fact that slavery and slave trade were deeply integrated into European society, reaching into places and situations far removed from the Atlantic basin. Therefore the Moravian Brethren and their congregations were Atlantic hinterlands as well as hinterlands of slavery (Brahm/Rosenhaft 2016) in both a physical and metaphorical sense. The paper examines the various reasons behind the presence of these persons in the Moravian Brethren’s Gemeinorte and discusses the significance of this phenomenon in the context of slavery and dependency in early modern Europe..