# CHAPTER 4  
## JOSEPH BOLOGNE DE SAINT-GEORGES (1745-1799)  
Margaret Crosby-Arnold  
Eulogizing his long-time friend, the playwright Jean-Guillaume-Antoine Cuvelier de Trie (1766-1824) captured his contemporaries' esteem for Joseph Bologne de Saint-Georges (1745-1799) when he described the latter as 'the Voltaire of the musical arts'. While many biographical sketches of Saint-Georges have been published, most scholars have unquestioningly relied on race as their main category of analysis, treating him as a 'mulatto' anomaly in a western world otherwise marked by the enslavement of Africans. The global Atlantic of the eighteenth century was, however, a highly cosmopolitan world, far more marked by migration and diversity across colour than scholars have previously depicted. Particularly from the second half of the eighteenth century on, when human migration on a global scale - forced, coerced or otherwise - accelerated everywhere, almost everybody was either a newcomer, or not more than a generation or two removed from somebody who was. Increasing globalization and migration drove the increase in diversity and, in that atmosphere of cultural exchange, transfer and hybridization, a tremendous flowering of new and agglomerated ways of being was inevitable. Whether German or West African, French or East Indian, Scottish or Chinese, Irish or Walloon, urban or rural, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, crypto-Jewish or a blend of some sort, the great patchwork of eighteenth-century populations shared common histories of migration and experiences of being newcomers. It is important to understand  
that the horrific circumstances of enslaved African migration occurred alongside not only the coerced migration of a host of non-African peoples but also the voluntary migration of free people of African descent. It was, thus, a world of fluid identities, socioeconomic multiplicity and constant migration as well as cultural transfer and flowering that both shaped Saint-Georges and made his rise to international celebrity possible.