Description:

Abstract: As he traveled across Germany and the Netherlands and sailed on Dutch and Brandenburg slave ships to the Caribbean and Africa from 1682 to 1696, the young barber-surgeon Johann Peter Oettinger (1666‐1746) recorded his experiences in a detailed manuscript journal, discovered by Zaugg and Koslofsky in a Berlin archive in 2010‐11. From his home in rural south‐western Germany, Oettinger found his way into the Atlantic world of slavery and trade. He provides us with a unique German‐language account of West Africa, the slave trade, and the Middle Passage. The value of his manuscript journal for the history of West Africa and the Atlantic world is seen, for example, in Oettinger’s account of the Kingdom of Hueda (present-day southern Bénin). In March 1693 the barber-surgeon stayed for a few weeks in Huedan country and was admitted to the royal court in Savi, where he met King Agbangla (d. 1703) and participated in negotiations that lead to the purchase of more than 700 slaves. His remarks are among the very few written sources about the royal palace of Savi, which was completely destroyed during the Dahomean conquest of 1727. They contain detailed information about Huedan courtly culture and provide a basis for further study of the appropriation of European, American, and Asian commodities by West African elites.

Bio: 

Roberto Zaugg is Ambizione fellow of the Swiss National Sciences Foundation at the University of Lausanne (since 2015). After studying at the University of Florence (1999-2004) and earning a PhD at the University of Naples Federico II (2008), he has taught early modern history at the University of Basel (2008-2013) and at Sciences Po Paris (2013-2015). He has been visiting scholar at the University of Ghana (Accra, 2012) and as “Gabriel Monod” fellow at the Institut français d'histoire en Allemagne (Frankfurt, 2014). He is an associated member of the Centre d’histoire de Sciences Po, the Centre of African Studies Basel, the
Graduate Interdisciplinary Network for European Studies (GRAINES), as well as a former member of the editorial committee of the Revue Suisse d’Histoire (2011-2013). He has served as co-director of the Franco- Swiss-Italian research project “Aux bords des institutions. Pouvoirs, acteurs et pratiques marchandes dans
l’Europe méditerranéenne”. His main research areas concern the practices and institutions of Mediterranean and Atlantic trade, migratory phenomena and citizenship rights, Euro-African relations, as well as travel literature and autobiographical writings.

Craig Koslofsky (Ph.D. University of Michigan, 1994) works in early modern European history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His study of the night, Evening's Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2011) won the Longman - History Today 2011 Book of the Year Award. His research on the history of daily life, the body in the Atlantic world, and the history of Christianity have led to his current project, a history of human skin in the early modern era.