ABSTRACT
This essay further explores Moravian conflicts over and complicity with slavery by examining Moravian slave-owning missions in the Danish West Indies. The mission history of the Moravian Church, Hüsgen contends, has deemphasized the Church’s complicity with slavery, instead emphasizing its long-time friendship with various missionary societies and the “indirect” influence of its missions on slave emancipation. In this essay, he offers a fresh analysis of the manumission of the Moravian slaves under pressure of the transatlantic antislavery movement. As he makes clear, this process has never been analyzed within its global historical context and under consideration of the different parties involved. His essay also highlights the interests of the different parties involved in the process and refers to the strategies of colonial authorities, Moravian missionaries, the Church board, and the Moravian slaves. Based on new archival findings, Hüsgen’s micro-historical approach demonstrates how economic objectives clashed with the directives from the London-based mission society following the British Emancipation Act of 1833, and sheds light on the macro-historical legal and spiritual disputes over slavery and emancipation that resonated throughout the ecumenical global missionizing world.
