Peter Mark

IN ENGLISH
This essay discusses the historiography of relations between Africans and Europeans, and among Africans on Senegambia/Upper Guinea Coast and in the Cape Verde Islands in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. While social domination was connected with slave or free status, “racism” and a “racial” approach do not accurately explain it. Prevailing scholarly interpretations of “racism” in Early Modern Europe are contested as prone to an ahistorical and teleological approach. An alternative to the idea of an underlying “racism”, or “racisms”, as a constant across historical periods and common to many diverse cultures would be a focused and historically contextualized study of the manner in which societies categorized people and then either did or did not ascribe characteristics to members of the resultant groups.

EM PORTUGUÊS
Este ensaio discute a historiografia das relações entre africanos e europeus, e entre os africanos na Senegâmbia/Upper Guinea Coast e nas ilhas de Cabo Verde no final do século XVI e início do século XVII. Para o contexto estudado, se se confirma que a dominação social estava conectada com os estatutos de escravo ou livre, argumenta-se que o racismo e a abordagem racial não a explicam com rigor. As interpretações académicas predominantes do “racismo” na Europa Moderna são contestadas como propensas a uma abordagem a-histórica e teleológica. Defende-se que uma alternativa metodológica à ideia de um “racismo” subjacente, ou “racismos”, como uma constante em todos os períodos históricos e comum a muitas culturas diversas seria um estudo focalizado e historicamente contextualizado da maneira pela qual as sociedades categorizavam as pessoas e, conhecida a mesma, ver que características atribuíam ou não aos membros dos grupos resultantes dessa classificação.

Th e blade weapons trade expanded early in the seventeenth century, by which time it was tied inextricably to the slave trade; weapons fi gured significantly among the goods exchanged for captives. Two centuries later, as the Casamance entered the geopolitical orbits of France and England on the eve of the
colonial period, the weapons trade again came to play a prominent role in overseas
exchange with Europe. Th is time, however, it was not blade weapons but fi rearms that were imported into Casamance. Our chapter describes and compares the two stages in the weapons trade to the Casamance.