Daughters of the Trade: Atlantic Slavers and Interracial Marriage on the Gold Coast

Pernille Ipsen Daughters of the Trade: Atlantic Slavers and Interracial Marriage on the Gold Coast. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. xi + 269 pp. (Cloth US$49.95)

Pemille Ipsen teaches in the departments of Gender and Women's Studies and History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her book, a volume in the Early Modern American Series, introduces readers to a neglected subject, namely interracial marriages between Danish men, employed by Danish trading companies, and Accra women from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Given that a number of present-day Ghanaian families carry Danish surnames (e.g., Quist, Hansen, Reindorf, Shandorf, Richter, Malm, and Lutterodt), the study is appropriate. It consists of an introduction, five chapters, an epilogue, endnotes, and a bibliography, plus three maps, eleven figures, two colored plates, and a short essay on the sources. Ipsen relied on archival records from the Danish National Archives in Copenhagen, as well as published primary sources such as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travelers' accounts of the Gold Coast, and the correspondence of the Royal African Company. The secondary sources include an impressive range of historical, anthropological, gender, and literary studies by...