Black Caribbean Empowerment and Early Eighteenth-Century Moravian Missions Documents

Abstract

The article suggests a new reading of the documents related to the early period of eighteenth-century Moravians' missionary activities in the Danish West Indies that started in 1732. The early period of Moravian missionary presence – between the 1730s and 1760s – differed from subsequent periods because later periods lost the original attempts to establish spiritual equality. A close reading of the various documents allows one to detect forms of active protest and creative agency on the part of enslaved people that were fostered, wittingly or unwittingly, by the Moravian missionaries. The article claims that the early Moravian missionaries to the Danish West Indies laid a spiritual foundation that provided a great deal more encouragement and secular empowerment to the thousands of slaves with whom they came into contact than has been considered so far in the scholarship.