Black Cosmopolitans: Race, Religion and Republicanism in an Age of Revolution by Christine Levecq

Abstract

Reviewed by: Black Cosmopolitans: Race, Religion and Republicanism in an Age of Revolution by Christine Levecq Ryan Hanley Christine Levecq, Black Cosmopolitans: Race, Religion and Republicanism in an Age of Revolution ( Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2019). Pp. 304. $45.00 cloth. Many eighteenth-century Black intellectuals, both free and enslaved, led lives characterized by continuous travel around the Atlantic world and beyond. The textual and ideological effects of Black writers' being in constant motion, and of their voluntary and involuntary transplantation between vastly different cultural milieux, have preoccupied scholars for decades. Yet for all this attention, there has been a notable paucity of work which takes seriously the concept of cosmopolitanism in terms of our understanding of these most globally mobile of thinkers. Christine Levecq's illuminating study takes on the challenge of understanding eighteenth-century Black cosmopolitanism on its own terms, drawing particular attention to the effects of a highly mobile lifestyle on Black authors' engagement with the republican and civic humanist traditions. The book is arranged into an introduction and three quite substantial chapters, each focusing on the life and work of one Black cosmopolitan in the context of his predominating interests. Jacobus Capitein (c.1717–c.1747) is perhaps best known for the troublingly committed defence of slavery given in his 1742 postgraduate dissertation at the University of Leiden, published in both Latin and Dutch. Enslaved as a child and sold to a Dutch West India Company trader in 1725, he was brought to the Netherlands, educated in the Dutch tradition, and trained as a minister and missionary at Leiden. Less well-known, but reconstructed with admirable attention to detail here, is what happened after he graduated and travelled to work as a minister at the slave fort of Elmina on the Gold Coast in October 1742. Faced with the horrific realities he witnessed there as much as mistreatment from his colleagues, it appears that, without declaring himself anything like opposed to the slave trade, Capitein began to emphasize an ideology of racial equality. Judging by the material cited by [End Page 504] Levecq, this appears to have been a subtle process, chiefly centered on the issues of mixed marriages and of teaching local African people. Despite his best efforts, his personal circumstances at Elmina grew chaotic, and he died, deeply in debt, in 1747, further entrenching a rather unflattering image that has dogged him ever since. Levecq's stated intention for this chapter is to "if not dispel, at least modify his image as a mouthpiece for Western colonialism" (20), in pursuit of which she even goes so far as to paint Capitein as a radical figure pushing the racially egalitarian potential of proslavery Calvinist thought. Reviewing the impressively broad range of evidence Levecq has brought to bear in service to this argument, I would personally be inclined towards a more timid modification than the frontal challenge she sometimes aims for. "His untimely death cut the process short," she suggests, "but it seems that Capitein was on his way to developing a more inclusive, multiracial form of cosmopolitanism" (59–60). I would like to think that she is correct, but it is difficult to justify reassessing an individual's existing work on the basis of what we think they might have written had they lived longer. The rereading of Capitein's dissertation in the context of the Dutch Calvinist tradition is, however, on much sturdier ground; Levecq reconstructs his theological influences to convincingly demonstrate that his dissertation served as a justification for the missionary work of the slave-holding West Indian Company, rather than as an "embrace of the institution of slavery" itself (57). This book is similarly strong on the multivalent influences of "race" in shaping the experiences of these figures as they navigated the Atlantic world. This is particularly true of the second chapter on Jean-Baptiste Belley (c.1746–1805), a formerly enslaved Senegalese man and leader in the early years of the Haitian Revolution who in 1793 became the first Black representative in the French National Convention. Levecq skilfully picks apart the nuances of how Belley navigated both St. Dominguan and French society as a "non-mixed" Black man, paying particular...