ABSTRACT
An insight into the African American presence in the United States, the Caribbean, and South America and into the Afro-European presence in Europe and Africa requires a multidirectional history of all three parts of the triangle. This chapter focuses on the development of the theory and idea of racial paternalism, and on the comparison between American and European studies of race, slavery, and slave trade. The debate triggered by the American historian of slavery Stanley Elkins in the 1960s was also about paternalism and infantilization; it is compared here with similar and different European developments, attitudes, and reactions to blackness, particularly romantic racialism and exoticism. In the south of Europe, especially in Christian Spain, the enslavement of Christians was replaced by that of Muslims captured as prisoners of war, according to the pioneer Belgian historian of Medieval slavery, Charles Verlinden.
