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Hannimari Jokinen, 2024

“10 Hamburg based merchants form 1 trading company” and hire ‘1 large, well-mounted ship’ - these are the introductory words of a calculation example in the textbook for prospective merchants, which, from 1686 on, was published in six editions in Hamburg. According to the fictitious calculation, the merchants bring “linen, damask, various metal goods” to West Africa. There, the cargo is traded for “gold, elephant tusks” and 202 enslaved Africans, which are shipped to the Caribbean. On the island of St. Thomas, colonized by Danmark, the abductees are exchanged for sugar produced on the plantations by enslaved Africans. On the return of their ships to Hamburg, the merchants rake in a profit of 100 percent.

This exemplary accounting calculation from a long-used Hamburg textbook illustrates how self-evident it seems to have been that the city, over many decades, did participate in the transatlantic enslavement trade, that is: in the crime against humanity. Taking a closer look at Hamburg’s urban space, infrastructures of the transatlantic enslavement trade, the global players within, and the production of respective goods can still be discovered. For decades, civil society activists have been drawing attention to these forgotten vestiges.

Stationen

Vestiges of cloth and sugar

“Colonial goods” for Altona

Altona’s transatlantic shipping

The “System Schimmelmann”

“In service in Wandsbek” - beholding a group portrait

A decolonial view of the Blücher Memorial in Altona

Abolition? Lip service in the Emkendorfer Circle salon

Whose “Golden Age”?

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