The right to freedom: Eighteenth-century slave resistance and early Moravian missions in the Danish West Indies and Dutch Suriname.

The essay retrieves the complex and at times contradictory encounters of Moravian missionaries, a Protestant group from Saxony, with enslaved Africans. For my investigation, I will single out both groups’ contact in the early eighteenth-century Danish West Indies and Dutch Suriname. I claim that, in their mission-related contacts during this specific period, both groups would receive glimpses of secular possibilities for future societies which eventually would help bring changes to their own specific secular settings. For the enslaved Africans, it implied an insistence on freedom from the misanthropic institution of New World slavery; for the Germans, it implied a maturing of progressive ideas in regard to the still existing secular estates system. This could happen only because these first missionaries often operated with means that were not part of any official mission directives. I will demonstrate this with three aspects: the missionaries’ approach to literacy for the enslaved, their encouragement of the enslaved to verbal and even legal protest, and, probably the most empowering tool, their invalidation of white people’s assumed God-given superiority in the eyes of black people. The nexus of these three aspects very likely contributed to each group’s vision of a society-to-come, which, in turn, must have led more to an ideological insistence on the human right to freedom with all its different implications than has been noted so far in scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]