Introduction: Towards a Comprehensive European History of Slavery and Abolition

Summary

Genealogies

On an uncertain date in the early 1780s, a medical student at the University of Gottingen drew a sketch in the autograph book of one of his fellow students (Fig. 0.1). The sketch represents an enslaved black woman and her child standing next to a barrel and a box marked ‘Caffe’, and bears the caption ‘Ce qui sert a vos plaisirs est mouille de nos larmes’.

The model for the sketch is certainly the best-known illustration in the 1773 work of Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Voyage à l’Isle de France (Fig. 0.2). Bernardin's work was an account of his visit to the slave island of Mauritius and was recognised in its own day as a key abolitionist text – not least because of the very pointed messages purveyed by Jean-Michel Moreau's engravings. A comparison of the two images suggests that the sketch was drawn from memory, and as such it tells us something both about the circulation of slavery and anti-slavery discourses in continental Europe in the late eighteenth century. It also reveals the extent to which visions of the slave Atlantic took root in the consciousness of Europeans of whom we might presume that they were at best observers of, and not party to, the traffic in human lives and the exploitation of human bodies that the pictures critique.

As the serendipity that sometimes drives academic research would have it, it was only in the course of compiling this volume that we identified the author of the sketch, who signs himself C. Heyne, as the brother of Therese Huber. Sarah Lentz's account of Huber's career (chapter 8) makes clear that this fact locates Carl Heyne and his sketch at an early stage in the development of a personal network of abolitionist propagandists which not only crossed borders but reached into territories distant from the Atlantic coast.

At the same time, the context in which the sketch was produced throws up more poignant questions about material and moral (or what we might call objective and subjective) engagement in slavery on the part of contemporaries who were not engaged directly in the slave trade or the operation of plantations, and who might live hundreds of miles from any slaving port. At about the same time as Carl Heyne was drawing his anti-slavery image, Friedrich Munter was arriving in Gottingen to study classics and theology.