Further Additions to Materials for West African History in the Archives of Belgium and Holland by Patricia Carson

1969 ◽  
Vol 12 (01) ◽  
pp. 81-89
Author(s):  
H. M. Feinberg
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
West African ◽  
African History ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
The West ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
The Hague ◽  
State Archives

This article is a supplement to a previous article on the same subject published in the African Studies Bulletin. Before I list further citations omitted from Materials for West African History in the Archives of Belgium and Holland, I will discuss, in some detail, the nature of the archival material deposited in the Algemeen Rijksarchief, The Hague. I will attempt to enhance the brief discussions of Miss Carson while avoiding repetition of statements which seem clear and/or are adequately discussed in her book. The General State Archives, The Hague, includes two major collections of interest to the West African historian: the Archives of the West India Companies and the Archives of the Netherlands Settlements on the Guinea Coast. Initially, one must realize that most of the seventeenth-century papers of both collections have been lost or destroyed, and that as a consequence there are many gaps among the existing manuscripts. For example, volume 81 (1658-1709) of the Archives of the Netherlands Settlements on the Guinea Coast includes only manuscripts for the following times: December 25, 1658-June 12, 1660; August, 1693; and October 12-December 31, 1709. Also, most of the seventeenth-century material is written in script, whereas the eighteenth-century manuscripts, with some exceptions, are in more conventional hand-writings.

Additions to Materials for West African History in the Archives of Belgium and Holland by Patricia Carson, London, 1962

1967 ◽  
Vol 10 (03) ◽  
pp. 48-53
Author(s):  
H. M. Feinberg
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Social Influences ◽  
West African ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
The Political ◽  
African History ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
Initial Basis ◽  
West India Company

I was in the Netherlands between November 1, 1966 and May 15, 1967, investigating the manuscripts concerned with the Dutch presence on the Gold Coast. My work involved research into the political and social influences of the Dutch at Elmina during the first half of the eighteenth century. Patricia Carson's book, Materials for West African History in the Archives of Belgium and Holland, served as an initial basis for my research; this article is primarily intended to supplement her citations. Miss Carson's guide has provided students of West African history with an initial indication of the vast amount of manuscript material existing in the Netherlands. I would, therefore, like first to pay tribute to Miss Carson for the magnitude of her effort and the strength of her trailblazing work. Her guide to the manuscript materials in the Netherlands is accurate and displays a great amount of painstaking effort on her part. The fact that I am able to supplement her book, I believe, is based on my growing knowledge of the Archives of the Second West India Company and the Archives of the Netherlands Settlements on the Guinea Coast. I also had the good fortune in that the staff of the Algemeen Rijksarchief was most helpful in suggesting inventories of which Miss Carson may not have been aware or which she might have missed. In addition, I was able to check other manuscript repositories, one or two of which yielded useful citations.

Early European Sources Relating to the Kingdom of Ijebu (1500-1700): A Critical Survey

1986 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 245-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Law
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Limited Range ◽  
West African ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Early History ◽  
Critical Survey ◽  
African History ◽  
The West ◽  
History Of ◽  
Original Information

The history of the Yoruba, as is well known, is very poorly documented from contemporary European sources prior to the nineteenth century, in comparison with their neighbors Benin to the east and the states of the ‘Slave Coast’ (Allada, Whydah, and Dahomey) to the west. There is, however, one Yoruba kingdom which features in contemporary European sources from quite early times, and for which at least intermittent documentation extends through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is the kingdom of Ijebu in southern Yorubaland. The availability of contemporary European documentation for the early history of Ijebu is especially valuable since the historical traditions of Ijebu itself do not appear to be very rich.Such, at least, is the impression given by published accounts of Ijebu history: although a large number of kings of Ijebu are recalled, thereby suggesting for the kingdom a considerable antiquity, and though there is some recollection locally of early contacts with the Portuguese, it does not seem that Ijebu traditions record much in the way of a detailed narrative of the kingdom's early history. At the same time, the European sources referring to Ijebu present considerable problems of interpretation, particularly with regard to establishing how far successive references to the kingdom constitute new original information rather than merely copying a limited range of early sources, and consideration of them helps to illuminate the character of early European sources for west African history in general. For these reasons, it seems a useful exercise to pull together all the available early European source material relating to Ijebu down to the late seventeenth century.

Sortings and ‘Ounce Trade’ in the West African Slave Trade

1964 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 381-393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl Polanyi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
West African ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
The West ◽  
African Slave ◽  
Two Systems

The records of trading between Africans and Europeans on the Guinea Coast since antiquity raise issues the practical resolution of which has never ceased to occupy economic historians. The Herodotean inadequacies of dumb barter in Carthaginian goods and in gold dust were fully resolved only at the time of the eighteenth-century slave trade. In Senegambia and even on the Windward Coast, as we now know, the Royal African Company had still to go without an effective profit-and-loss accountancy. With the advent of the regular slave trade two new commercial devices had to be introduced by the Europeans. Both the ‘sorting’ and the ‘ounce trade’ sprang from the vital need for adjustment between the radically different trading methods of Europeans and Africans. And it was not so much a case of mutual adjustment, for of the two systems only one, the European, adjusted.

An Inventory of Microfilms of Selected Danish Archives (Rigsarkvet-Københaven) Concerning West Africa

1981 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 339-360
Author(s):  
James Sanders
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
The West ◽  
Court Records ◽  
Trading Company ◽  
The Board Of Directors ◽  
The Government ◽  
State Archives ◽  
Selection Of

The following inventory of eighty-five reels of microfilm represents a selection of documents which relate to West Africa from the State Archives of Denmark. The documents date from 1624 to 1823, though the majority of them originated in the eighteenth century. They were taken from three major classes of records in the Rigsarkivet in Copenhagen: the West India and Guinea Company (Vestindiskguineisk Kompagni), the Guinea Company (Guineisk Kompagni), and the Various Records from Guinea (Diverse arkivalier fra Guinea). The West India and Guinea Company and the Guinea Company (or, more specifically, the Royal Chartered Danish Guinea Trading Company) were two of the most important companies involved in the West African trade in the eighteenth century. However, there was another, the Royal Danish Baltic-Guinea Company, which received a charter in 1779. Unfortunately, its records have not survived. Most of the documents in this collection are written in Danish, but some are in Dutch since many of the Danish Guinea Company's employees were Dutch.The West India and Guinea Company (1671-1755) archives consist of three groups of material: company records in Copenhagen, records sent to Denmark from the Government on the Guinea Coast (1698-1754), and accounts sent to Denmark from the Guinea Coast (1698-1754). The company records in Copenhagen, inventory numbers 28-483 (reel numbers 1-27), consist mainly of letter books of the Board of Directors and incoming and outgoing letters and documents. Records in the second group, inventory numbers 880-890 (reel numbers 27-33), include Minutes of the Council at Christiansborg and journals, letter books, and court records. The third group, inventory numbers 891-932 (reel numbers 33-50), consists mostly of account books, cash books, and ledgers.

The Trade in African Slaves to Rio de Janeiro, 1795–1811: Estimates of Mortality and Patterns of Voyages

1969 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 533-549 ◽  
Author(s):  
Herbert S. Klein
Keyword(s):  
Mortality Rate ◽  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
West African ◽  
African History ◽  
The West ◽  
African Development ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
Major Route

Despite its basic importance for an understanding of African History, the Atlantic slave-trade still remains one of the most unexplored aspects of modern African development. Except for a few pioneer works, there have been no systematic studies of numbers, origins, mortality, routes and volume of traffic. The present study is based on archival material in Brazil and is an exploration in depth of one major route, the West African to Rio de Janeiro shipping route in the period 1795–1811. During this time some 170,000 African slaves were shipped from Africa, suffering a mortality rate of 95 per thousand.

'In de commode van Parijs tot Den Haag' Matthijs Horrix (1735 -1809), een meubelmaker in Den Haag in de tweede helft van de achttiende eeuw

1993 ◽  
Vol 107 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-256
Author(s):  
R.J. Baarsen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
City Council ◽  
The Third ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Hague ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The City

AbstractSince 1988, when this journal carried an article on Andrics Bongen (ca. 1732-1792), probably the first cabinet-maker in Amsterdam to have made marquetry furniture in the French style in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, not one item has been added to his small oeuvre. It is therefore still not clear whether Bongen had a long and successful career, nor whether his production was large. This article deals with the eighteenth-century activities of Matthijs Horrix (1735 -1809), a furniture maker who in certain aspects may be regarded as Bongen's Hague counterpart. He, too, hailed from Germany, set up independently in the Netherlands in the 1760s and worked in the French style from the outset of his career. There are however no doubts as to bis success : he was The Hague's best-known furniture maker in the late eighteenth century, with the largest workshop. In the course of the nineteenth century the firm he founded grew into the largest in the Netherlands (note 4). Whereas it cannot be ascertained whether 'French' cabinet-making was ever a dominant trend in Amsterdam, one gets the impression that such was to some extent the case in The Hague after 1760. In the city where the Stadholder's court and foreign embassies were based, the French-oriented court style had been a significant factor since at least the late seventeenth century (notes 5, 6 and 8). Many patrons in The Hague were probably keen on furniture which actually came from France. In 1771 the guild of furniture makers complained to the city council about the influx of furniture imported from abroad; this probably meant imports from France (notes 9 and 10). Several furniture makers in The Hague began to imitate the French models. As early as 1761 Matthijs Franses (ca. 1726-1788), who came from Kempen near Krefeld, advertized that he made and sold a variety of veneered furniture in the French style. His descriptions are not very clear, but mention is made of commodes and tables inlaid with copper (in the Boulle technique?), commodes 'à la Diligence' with gilded bronze mouldings and marble tops, desks and 'Ouvrages en ébène'. Franses says nothing about marquetry featuring different kinds of wood, the most popular decorative technique in Paris around 1760 and the kind of work with which Bongen made his debut in Amsterdam in 1766. It seems likely that Horrix arrived in The Hague around 1761. He was born in 1735, probably in Lobberich near Krefeld (note 25). In a petition submitted in 1764 he stated that he had been apprenticed to a cabinet-maker in The Hague 'for some years'; the period in question was probably not longer than three years (notes 26 and 27). At the beginning of this period, then, Horrix was already 25 years of age or older. In view of the common practice throughout Europe for boys to be apprenticed to a craftsman at the age of fourteen or thereabouts for a period of some six years (note 28), Horrix may have worked in one or more shops elsewhere after his apprenticeship and before his arrival in The Hague. However, no information about this period is available. On May 15 1764, Horrix was enrolled in the Hague guild as a master cabinet-maker (note 33). On January 9th of that year he had acquired citizenship, and on May 5th he had married Elisabeth de la Fosse of The Hague. The wedding was witnessed by

‘A Welsh Lancashire’? Monmouthshire Catholics in the Eighteenth Century

1979 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
The West ◽  
The North ◽  
South Wales ◽  
Jesuit Mission ◽  
Charles Ii ◽  
Popish Plot

In the seventeenth century, one of the Catholic strongholds of Britain had lain on the southern Welsh borders, in those areas of north Monmouthshire and southern Herefordshire dependant on the Marquis of Worcester at Raglan, and looking to the Jesuit mission at Cwm. Abergavenny and Monmouth had been largely Catholic towns, while the north Monmouthshire countryside still merited the attention of fifteen priests in the 1670s—after the Civil Wars, and the damaging conversion to Protestantism of the heir of Raglan in 1667. Conspicuous Catholic strength caused fear, and the ‘Popish Plot’ was the excuse for a uniquely violent reaction, in which the Jesuit mission was all but destroyed. What happened after that is less clear. In 1780, Berington wrote that ‘In many [counties], particularly in the west, in south Wales, and some of the Midland counties, there is scarcely a Catholic to be found’. Modern histories tend to reflect this, perhaps because of available evidence. The archives of the Western Vicariate were destroyed in a riot in Bath in 1780, and a recent work like J. H. Aveling's The Handle and the Axe relies heavily on sources and examples from the north of England. This attitude is epitomised by Bossy's remark on the distribution of priests in 1773: ‘In Wales, the mission had collapsed’. However, the question of Catholic survival in eighteenth-century Wales is important. In earlier assessments of Catholic strength (by landholding, or number of recusants gaoled as a proportion of population) Monmouthshire had achieved the rare feat of exceeding the zeal of Lancashire, and Herefordshire was not far behind. If this simply ceased to exist, there was an almost incredible success for the ‘short, sharp’ persecution under Charles II. If, however, the area remained a Catholic fortress, then recent historians of recusancy have unjustifiably neglected it.

The Dahomean Middleman System, 1727–c. 1818

1987 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 357-375 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Ross
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West African ◽  
The West ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Supply Problem ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
African Coast ◽  
Trading Partners

During the first quarter of the eighteenth century, European merchants bought more slaves in the Bight of Benin than on any other part of the West African coast. From c. 1720 until 1727 much of their buying was concentrated in Savi, the capital of a small Aja state called Whydah. When the Dahomeans overran Savi in 1727 they stopped the inland slave suppliers from travelling to the coast, prevented the local Hueda from going inland to collect slaves, and insisted that the Europeans bought slaves only from Dahomean dealers. In an attempt to make sure that the Europeans had nothing more to do with their former trading partners the Dahomeans burned the factories in Savi and forced their European occupants to retire to Grehue, Savi's port, a spot on the coast where the Europeans maintained a number of fortified warehouses.The middleman policy did not at first operate satisfactorily. There were two reasons for this. The first was that the Dahomeans were, in practice, unable to prevent the Europeans from continuing to trade with the Hueda. The second was that the inland suppliers refused to sell slaves to Savi's conquerors. The Dahomeans solved their ‘coastal’ problem in the 1740S by placing a garrison in Grehue. This garrison kept the exiled Hueda at bay and held the Europeans in what amounted to open captivity. The Dahomeans were never able completely to solve their ‘supply’ problem. In the 1730s and 1740S the inland merchants took their slaves to ports which opened up on the Bight to the east of Grehue. Only in the 1750s and 1760s did they channel substantial numbers of slaves through Dahomey. In the last decades of the century they again boycotted the Dahomean market. Dahomey therefore prospered as a middleman state only between c. 1748 and c. 1770.An examination of their eighteenth century trading suggests that the Dahomeans were a slave-raiding community whose members realised in 1727 that they would soon run out of fresh raiding grounds. They appear to have introduced their middleman policy in an attempt to ensure that they would continue to profit from slave trading even after they had ceased to be able to take large numbers of captives themselves. Although the policy was by no means a complete success, it was important in that it seems to have led the Dahomeans to begin placing garrisons in the territories they ravaged. It appears, in fact, to have been the pursuit of their middleman goals that led them to begin creating the often described nineteenth century ‘greater’ Dahomean state. The middleman programme ceased to be of much importance after c. 1818, when the fall of Oyo enabled the Dahomeans to resume raiding widely in unexploited territory.

‘Sailing on the same uncertain sea’

2021 ◽  
pp. 77-96
Author(s):  
Douglas Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
West Indies ◽  
The West ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Imperial Rivalry

Although they were small, the islands of the Caribbean were central rather than peripheral to the idea of empire. By the seventeenth century, the islands of the Antillean archipelago were already integral to European imperial rivalry and—as a result—came to shape European notions of what empires were and what they were for. This chapter explores the shifting nature of these islands as they emerged to become imperial powerhouses in the eighteenth century. This transformation was set against the backdrop of the great upheavals of war and revolution. The shifting demography of the West Indies and their economic and strategic importance exposed them particularly to the threats created by the geopolitical maelstrom around them. This chapter argues that their island nature intensified how they were affected by, and responded to, the profound and unprecedented uncertainties of the Age of Revolutions.

Human Sacrifice

2021 ◽  
pp. 139-154
Author(s):  
John Parker
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
West African ◽  
The Self ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Human Sacrifice ◽  
The West ◽  
Southeastern Nigeria ◽  
Forms Of Violence

This chapter recounts the broader Akan world's or Asante's human sacrifice. It notes that the practice, as established by Law, was widespread in those parts of the West African coastal and forest zones largely untouched by Islam, both in powerful states such Benin, Dahomey and Asante and among non-centralized peoples such as the Igbo in present-day southeastern Nigeria. The chapter presents evidence suggesting that human sacrifice may well have increased in magnitude in the era of the Atlantic slave trade, as increasing levels of militarization and accumulation generated new forms of violence, predation and consumption. The earliest evidence for human sacrifice in the region, however, came from the Gold Coast itself, where, as elsewhere in West Africa, it was identified as an integral part of mortuary customs for the wealthy and powerful. The chapter then shows seventeenth-century accounts about the slaves who composed the majority of those immolated at royal funerals. It also explores how the self-sacrifice of certain individuals served on the early Akan states.

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