Intimacy and Emotions Across the European Empires

Two decades ago, the historian and anthropologist Ann Stoler revolutionized the study of empire by highlighting the centrality of intimacy to the construction, management, and contestation of imperial power. Her work began from the proposition that the “domains of the intimate”—sex, childrearing, relations with servants, cultivation of sentiments, and so on—were crucial sites in which colonial administrators and settler families produced and enforced class and racial categories and hierarchies. This argument has inspired scholars to look beyond the more traditional depictions of imperial power as coherent, metropole-based, and manifested mainly through overt violence, instead exploring how the organization of private lives across different colonial spaces served to construct the figures of both colonizer and colonized as well as to create and maintain the cultural distinctions that allegedly justified European governance of “uncivilized” peoples. Stoler’s work claimed that within empires, the personal was not just political, it was the framework upon which the entire edifice of colonial rule depended.¹

These arguments have been particularly influential among postcolonial scholars, feminists, and women’s historians, for they reaffirm what these theorists long have stressed: that the groups most often marginalized in the classic accounts of empire—indigenous and mixed-race people, servants, wives, mothers, and children—are worthy objects of study and consequential historical actors in their own right. Each of the three works under review begins from this premise, and, in different ways, they illustrate how the study of colonial intimacies and colonial families can rework, nuance, and sometimes transform the accepted narratives of European imperialism, nationhood, race, and identity. Read together, they also suggest how scholars might expand the study of intimacy through the insights and methodologies emerging from the newer field of the history of emotions.

Focused on Danish fort towns on the Gold Coast of West Africa during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Pernille Ipsen’s richly imagined first book, Daughters of the Trade, follows five generations of marriages between Danish slave traders and local African (or Euro-African) women. These unions were known as “cassare” or “keeping house” a term that demonstrates the deeply practical function that interracial marriage served in the uncertain and violent context of the slave trade. For Danish men struggling to adapt to an unfamiliar environment, a place where “heaven was high and Europe far away,” as a local saying went, the practice could mean the difference between life and death (24). Ga-speaking wives nursed their husbands through illness, cooked for them, raised their children, and, most importantly, represented their interests within the African community. As Ipsen points out, the reason we know anything at all about these marriages is because cassare as an institution was central to the expanding trade in slaves, providing a mechanism for both the Danish and African communities to forge mutually beneficial alliances. Local Danish officials recognized the significance of the marriages by refusing to enforce a company-ordered ban on sexual relations with African women, by frequently cassaring themselves and by working with chaplains to sanction the unions.

By concentrating on what both sides had to gain from cassare, Ipsen’s work revises the standard vision of the trade, which scholars commonly present as a story of violent destruction with clear victims and perpetrators. She does not discount the horrors that slavery wrought, yet she does seek to humanize slave traders, both European and African. In so doing, she calls attention to the opportunities that the trade opened up for certain groups of Africans, including most prominently the elite...