2019/08/01 by Jorge Simón Izquierdo Díaz
paper · doi:10.1017/s0165115319000238
Abstract This paper explores the Danish East India Company's slave trade practice in Tranquebar in the first half of the seventeenth century. In particular it focuses on a practice of acquiring black Morianer (Moors) as prestigious servants for aristocratic homes. The court of the Danish king Christian IV was familiar with the exotic inlay of Morians as represented in pictures, theatre, carrousels, and other artistic manifestations of the upper classes of that time. In this sense, I suggest that Hans Hansson Skonning's Geographia historica Orientalis (1641) provides seminal clues about ideology justifying slavery and representations of Africa and Asia in Scandinavian countries before they entered the slave trade.