Dutch Gold Coast: Difference between revisions

The European powers were sometimes drawn into conflicts with local inhabitants as Europeans developed commercial alliances with local political authorities. These alliances, often complicated, involved both Europeans attempting to enlist or persuade their closest allies to attack rival European ports and their African allies, or conversely, various African powers seeking to recruit Europeans as mercenaries in their inter-state wars, or as diplomats to resolve conflicts. Another way conflicts with the local inhabitants waswere avoided was through marriage. European men often created alliances with the local African people through a practice known as '''[[cassare]]''' or '''calisare''' derived from the Portuguese '''casar''' meaning "to marry." Dutch men and other Europeans would marry African women whose families had ties to the Atlantic slave trade. In this way, Europeans benefited from those marriages by corrupting African individuals in order to maintain the alliances responsible for massive, racial-based enslavement, which fabricated European wealth as much as fabricated African systemic empoverishment (underdevelopment)impoverishment. In essence, African individuals profited at the expense of enslavement and empoverishmentimpoverishment of African peoples, while European individuals profited as means of consolidating wealth for European peoples. <ref>{{cite book|last1=Rodney|first1=Walter|title=How Europe underdeveloped Africa|year=1972|publisher=Howard University Press|isbn=996-6-2511-38}}</ref>{{Page needed|date=November 2023}} African wives could receive money and schooling for the children they bore by European men. Wives could also inherit slaves and property from their husbands when they returned to Europe or died.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Ipsen|first1=Pernille|title=Daughters of the Trade: Atlantic Slavers and Interracial Marriage on the Gold Coast|year=2015 |publisher=University of Pennsylvania Press |isbn=978-0-8122-4673-5}}</ref>