Michael Leemann, “‘Weiße’ und ‘schwarze Schafe’: Versklavung, Rassismus und Religion in Berichten zur Herrnhuter Mission in Dänisch-Westindien”, in: Verglichene Körper: Normieren, Urteilen, Entrechten in der Vormoderne (Studien zur Alltags- und Kulturgeschichte 35), edited by Cornelia Aust, Antje Flüchter, and Claudia Jarzebowski, Stuttgart, 2022, pp. 137–160.

In their respective traditions, both the historiography of comparison and that of racism
incline toward narratives of secularization. It was not until the modern age, so the story goes, that religion lost its potential to stabilize world views: religion’s marginalization left a void which was eventually filled by practices of comparing and concepts of “race”. This article aims to show that, on the contrary, early modern religion laid the ground for dynamic negotiations of racist comparisons. The contribution is based on the Geschichte der Mission der evangelischen Brüder auf den caraibischen Inseln S Thomas, S Croix und S Jan (1777), which recounts the history of the Moravian mission to the enslaved people in the Danish West Indies. The mission history is available in two versions, a manuscript by Christian Georg Andreas Oldendorp (1721–1787) and a published edition, heavily revised by Johann Jakob Bossart (1721–1789). Both variants attempt to legitimize the enslavement of Africans and their descendants by comparing them with people of European descent, albeit in different ways. What these “races” were and which of their aspects could be compared was informed by different interpretations of religious anthropology.