Narratives from European-African Encounters (1400-1900)

Narratives embody cultural norms and values that shape human behaviour. This study analyses over 450,000 pages of travel accounts by 1,876 Europeans who visited Africa from 1400 to 1900 to understand the development, diffusion, and persistence of narratives across centuries. Guided by the ‘drama triangle’ model, we employ ad- vanced computational text analysis methods to systematically classify three distinct narrative roles: hero, villain, and victim. We find Europeans often portray them- selves as victims, while assigning African and Arab characters the roles of victim and villain. We observe that adjective attributes of roles differ across ethnic back- grounds. Using the Evaluation-Potency-Activity (EPA) framework, we investigate how exogenous changes in ‘Evaluation’, ’Potency’ and ‘Activity‘ determine transi- tions between character roles. We particularly highlight how increases in ’Potency’ for African characters predict their transition from victims to villains. Furthermore, by mapping the network of narrative inter-dependencies among traveller authors, we shed light on the origins and persistence of these narrative structures, offering new insights into the interplay between narrative formation and economic behaviour across different epochs.