Unlike Portugal, Spain, England, and France, none of the German-speaking territories of the Holy Roman Empire ever possessed a colonial empire. The colored textbook maps depicting the overseas dominions of European powers during the first global age (c. 1450–1815) do not show any Bavarian, Saxon, Hanseatic, or “German” territories in Asia, Africa, or the Americas. Pie charts representing national shares of the transatlantic slave trade barely display a “slice” devoted to the German lands.
For generations, the absence of German colonies during the first global age has led historians to draw a sharp line between the history of the Holy Roman Empire (the political unit that largely contained the German-speaking population of Europe) and what we call—in a slightly triumphant way—the “history of European expansion.” The emergence of the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, English, and French empires, and the rivalry and violence that accompanied their development in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, seemed very distant from German history as it moved from an age of Reformations to the disaster and destruction of the Thirty Years’ War. Certainly, some astute historians crossed the line between German history and European colonial history to make visible the connections between the German lands and new colonial sources of wealth and power, such as New World silver. But until very recently an awareness of such connections did not really affect the grand narrative of early modern German history: it continued to be conceived and narrated as a fundamentally intra-European scenario. Connections between the German lands and the wider world were not ignored, but, overall, they remained outside the focus of both academic scholarship and public memory.
This “landlocked” view of early modern German history has begun to change. As recent scholarship has made unmistakably clear, the men and women of the Holy Roman Empire were by no means disconnected from the early modern phase of “globalization.” Hamburg merchants invested in ventures to the Indies; German sailors served on East- and West-Indiamen; soldiers from Saxony and Hesse provided troops for colonial wars. Aristocrats and princes showed off their African servants (acquired through the Atlantic slave trade), and city-dwellers and peasants learned to love tobacco. German armchair travelers devoured accounts about foreign lands and peoples, nourishing the business of printers and engravers who responded to—and fueled—a growing interest in the distant wonders of the world.
Atlantic slavery played an important—although often overlooked—role in connecting early modern Germany to global trade. Not only did individual German merchants invest in slave-ship voyages or even acquire Caribbean plantations, but the trade also created economic and cultural ties at the regional level. German-speaking Europe was a huge market for the colonial goods produced by enslaved labor: re-export to the territories of the Holy Roman Empire constituted a major business for those European nations who did control overseas dominions—and for those German entrepreneurs who succeeded in establishing themselves as commercial brokers. The vast sugar-refining industry of Hamburg is one example of this. On the production side, specific manufactures such as knives, brass work, stoneware vessels, and linen textiles, produced in German towns or protoindustrial regions far from the shores of the North Sea, were key exports to both coastal West Africa and colonial America. Historians of early modern Africa have long debated how deeply, and in what ways, the economic force of the Atlantic slave trade affected the interior of the continent. Historians of early modern Central Europe have begun to ask similar questions, reconceptualizing the German-language region as a “globalized periphery” or even as a true “slavery hinterland.”1 One can no longer write the history of this region without considering its place in Atlantic and global economic, migratory, and cultural exchanges.
Johann Peter Oettinger’s biography is just one small thread in the vast, interwoven fabric that connected early modern Germany with the wider world. This book shares his story—the story of a teenager, a journeyman barber-surgeon, who left home to earn a living. He did so by walking from town to town, covering thousands of miles. He shaved beards, let blood, and set broken bones. For some years he worked for chartered slave-trading companies, which made huge profits by buying and transporting enslaved men, women, and children from one side of the Atlantic to the other. After fourteen years as a journeyman, Oettinger came home to his small town in southwestern Germany, where he settled down and became a respected citizen, husband, and father.
During his travels in Europe, West Africa, and the Caribbean, he kept a diary, writing down his day-to-day experiences: an extraordinary document from a rather ordinary man. Through chance, family pride, and a great deal of luck, Oettinger’s “Travel Account and Biography” has survived the three centuries since he wrote it. Today it can serve many purposes. One might be tempted to read it as a callous tale of adventure, but it also contains significant anthropological evidence and offers valuable details about the economic ties between Germany and the Atlantic world. Oettinger’s diary provides us with precious insights into the precarious youth of a poor migrant, and it is among the very few writings that allow us to reconstruct in detail the travels of a seventeenth-century artisan. And it is, first and foremost, the only known German-language eyewitness account of an entire slave-ship voyage in the triangle trade. By reading Oettinger’s description of the voyage from Europe to Africa, on to the Americas, and then back to Europe, we can reflect on daily life in the slave trade, its quotidian brutality, and the willingness of ordinary men to enact it. It bears straightforward witness to the commodification of human life and to the banality of evil.
Editing and publishing a work like this adds a new chapter to the manuscript’s history. As editors and translators of Oettinger’s diary, our chapter began in April 2012 when we met in Liverpool. Working independently, in 2010 and 2011 we had both discovered the manuscript in a neglected corner of a Berlin archive. Neither of us knew that the other had found the diary. In 2012 we learned of one another, each startled to discover that on the other side of the planet, another scholar was doing research on the very same document. After an initial moment of unsettling surprise, what could have become a disagreeable competition rapidly developed into a fruitful cooperation and, over time, into a true friendship. The conference where we met and co-presented the diary to the public, “The Slave Business and Its Material and Moral Hinterlands in Continental Europe,” held at the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, was the starting point for our shared project. We have continued to work on the diary ever since, more or less intensely, meeting in Paris, Basel, and Urbana, and at conferences in Dakar and Bremen.2
We worked to decipher the text and identify the persons and places Oettinger mentioned, to understand his jokes, and to see what he left out. But we sought, above all, to make sense of the life and words of this migrant laborer in broader contexts: the connected but deeply different worlds of continental Europe, coastal West Africa, and the colonies of the Caribbean. In Oettinger’s time all three regions were undergoing profound changes that historians are still working to understand. By translating Oettinger’s journal into English, we intend to make this source accessible to a broader readership, for whom the (early modern) German text would have been a significant obstacle.3 We hope that—together with the introduction and the additional documentary sources—this translation will be able to speak both to scholars pursuing their own research and to students engaging with the history of the Atlantic world. (We have kept the footnotes to a minimum: interested readers who wish to learn more will find a thematically ordered guide to sources in the back matter.)
Over these years we have had the opportunity to present our work on several occasions and to discuss it with a wide range of colleagues. For the stimulating debates we had and the critical feedback we received at different stages of the project, we are deeply grateful to Adam Jones, Kofi E. Baku, Felix Brahm, Gérard Chouin, Martin Dinges, David Diop, Renate Dürr, Philip Hahn, Wolfgang Kaiser, Martin Klein, Josef Köstlbauer, Stefan Kraut, Sarah Lentz, Rebekka von Mallinckrodt, Pap Ndiaye, Akosua A. Perbi, Matthieu Péry, Eve Rosenhaft, Ousmane Seydi, Jakob Vogel, Klaus Weber, as well as the late Patrick Harries. All the participants at the 2012 Liverpool conference on “The Slave Business and Its Material and Moral Hinterlands in Continental Europe” deserve a special word of thanks for their engagement with this project at its earliest stage. Much more recently Christina Brauner, Karwan Fatah-Black, Erika Gasser, and Hannah Murphy each read the book manuscript and offered vital advice and suggestions, which we greatly appreciated.
During the transcription and editing process, we have benefitted from the skills and support of Laurent Burrus, Cristian Consuegra, Anja Eichelberg, Amanda Eisemann, Lance Lubelski, Leslie Tingle, and Iris van Meer. Erik Midelfort was enthusiastic from the start and hugely encouraging, and we are proud that the book appears in Studies in Early Modern German History. The advice of Richard Holway and Nadine Zimmerli was crucial as we transformed our project into a book for the University of Virginia Press. A true “Atlantic German,” Nadine went above and beyond her editorial duties by comparing our translation with the original German text, which improved the finished product greatly. Many thanks to Patrice Mitrano and Anouk Pettes of the Atelier de Cartographie de Sciences Po for mapping Oettinger’s voyages. Our research and editorial project would not have been possible without the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Swiss National Science Foundation. Additional funding has been provided by the Freie Akademische Gesellschaft Basel, the Institut Français d’Histoire en Allemagne (now Institut Franco-Allemand de Sciences Historiques et Sociales), and by the universities at which we have worked during these years.
Craig would like to thank in particular his colleagues in the Department of History at the University of Illinois, especially participants in the Premodern World Reading Group. For their help with the funding of this project, thanks go out to Tom Bedwell, Maria Gillombardo, Tim Tufte, and Stefanie Walker. For advice, assistance, and inspiration thanks to Erika Gasser, Erik Gøbel, Andrew Kettler, Hannah Murphy, Jenny Shaw, and John Thornton; Regulus Allen and Richard Frohock of the Early Caribbean Society; and Sean Hanretta and the Program of African Studies, Northwestern University. My deepest thanks go, as always, to Dana Rabin.
This project has accompanied Roberto on his postdoctoral peregrinations, leading from the University of Basel to Sciences Po (Paris), then back in Switzerland, to the universities of Lausanne, Bern, and finally Zurich. Kaspar von Greyerz introduced me to the study of early modern autobiographical sources, encouraged me to explore new scholarly horizons, and has been, with his advice and friendship, a constant point of reference. Questions about the ways to engage with European travelogues have been a persistent challenge—discussions with Susanna Burghartz provided a precious resource for fine-tuning my analytical tools. On the shores of the Lac Léman I was warmly welcomed by Danièle Tosato-Rigo and her research group working on first-person writings from early modern Switzerland. Christian Windler and I only overlapped for a couple of months at the Historisches Institut in Bern, but his support began well before that, and his scholarly inspiration continues to the present. Francisca and Davide have been with me all along through the years of work on this book: I owe them much.
Together we dedicate this book to our families in Europe, Africa, and America.
Urbana and Basel, January 2020
1. See Brahm and Rosenhaft, Slavery Hinterland, as well as Wimmler and Weber, Globalized Peripheries.
2. “L’Afrique des savants européens (XVIIe–XXe siècle),” Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, 5–7 February 2018; “Traces of the Slave Trade in the Holy Roman Empire and Its Successor States: Discourses, Practices, and Objects, 1500–1850,” Universität Bremen, 29 November–1 December 2018.
3. A German critical edition will be published separately.