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.

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.

An Eighteenth-Century Case of Plagiarism: William Smith's A New Voyage to Guinea

1979 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 45-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
H.M. Feinberg
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Critical Appraisal ◽  
Extended Period ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
The Political ◽  
African History ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Complete Report

In the first number of History in Africa P.E.H. Hair reiterated A.W. Lawrence's plea for a “critical appraisal” and analysis of primary sources for African history. The aim of this brief note is to appraise the originality of certain of these works. The focus will be the Gold Coast, with emphasis on the book by William Smith, A New Voyage to Guinea, first published in 1744 and reprinted (without an introduction or editorial comment) by Frank Cass in 1967.The literature about the Gold Coast during the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries is rich in accounts by visitors, residents, and compilers. Dapper, Barbot, Bosman, Atkins, and Smith all provided descriptions. Only Bosman lived on the Gold Coast for an extended period of time, and the concentration of detail in his book reflects that experience. From about the 1720s to the early nineteenth century, a hiatus in the descriptive literature exists, but then Meredith, De Marree, Bowdich, and Dupuis resume the earlier tradition, so that one cannot say that the Gold Coast has been ignored in terms of European visitors or their original descriptions of the it area.However, when we look carefully at some of these narratives, we find that not all of what is written is in fact original. For example, Barbot's account of the political organization of Elmina is an exact duplicate, in translation from the Dutch, of Dapper's description. Barbot also copied his description of the “Degrees of Blacks” from Bosman. De Marree, an early nineteenth century Dutch official on the Gold Coast, included without attribution in his narrative, a complete report by Governor General Pieter Linthorst written in 1807.

The Ounce in Eighteenth-Century West African Trade

1966 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-214 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marion Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Exchange Rates ◽  
West African ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
The West ◽  
Permanent Change ◽  
Local Currency ◽  
Prime Cost ◽  
A Value ◽  
Low Costs

The Ounce as a unit in the West African trade was originally applied to the goods which could be exchanged on the Gold Coast for one ounce of gold; it was generally reckoned that such goods would cost about 40s. in Europe, or half the European value of the gold. Calculations based on actual transactions show that the prime cost of an Ounce of goods was sometimes lower than this, when a favourable assortment of goods had been chosen. In the 1760's and 1770's gold was no longer being exported from the Gold Coast, but was demanded as part of the price of slaves; an ounce of gold was then valued at two Ounces of trade goods. The price of gold had risen, partly owing to a local stoppage of trade, and perhaps also because of a permanent change in the direction of Ashanti gold exports.At Whydah, the Ounce was not in use in the first half of the eighteenth century; values of goods, including cowries, the local currency, were expressed in terms of the quantity equivalent to one slave. By 1772 the Ounce had come into use at a value similar to that on the Gold Coast. The French selling cheap brandy, and the Portuguese selling cheap Brazilian tobacco, were able to operate at very low costs per Ounce.The ‘slave-price’ rigsdaler of Christiansborg, with regular exchange rates both with gold and with cowries, forms a link between the Gold and Slave Coast systems.A table of slave prices at various dates during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is given in terms of Ounces and other units.

Mapping the Malagueta Coast: a History of the Lower Guinea Coast, 1460–1510 through Portuguese Maps and Accounts

2009 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 331-365 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Massing
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
World Economy ◽  
Iron Ore ◽  
West African ◽  
African History ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
World Demand ◽  
History Of

The Malagueta Coast can serve as a classic example of a region which was integrated into the world economy as a result of world demand for its resources—spices and labor in the fifteenth/sixteenth centuries, and again in the nineteenth century palm oil, cocos fiber, and labor—and has sunk into oblivion once the demand ceased. It is similar with Liberia's rubber and iron ore industry of the twentieth century. I had wanted to write this paper, which reconstructs the discovery and commercial exploitation of the coast through a systematic analysis of published maps and reports, ever since I walked and paddled along this coast in 1968. Furthermore I intend to review the discovery of the coast in the perspective of overall Portuguese policy and politics (interior and foreign). Last, but not least, this is to help students of Liberian and West African history with a review of the early sources—among which maps are by far the most abundant.The Portuguese legacy to Africa is enshrined in coastal toponymy until today. Avelino Teixeira da Mota in his “Topónimos de origem portuguesa” focused on Portuguese names still surviving in the nineteenth century, but I will focus here on contemporary fifteenth- and sixteenth-century nomenclature and what it might reveal about the African discoveries. The Portuguese initially were attracted by gold at the Rio d'Ouro (later Spanish Sahara), then slaves, and eventually malagueta—a substitute for Indian pepper—commodities known on the Lisbon market and which served to name the coasts: malagueta, marfim, ouro, esclavos. Diogo Gomes was the first to actually see Malagueta on the Gambia in 1445, but the malagueta coast was not discovered until after Henry's the Navigator's death in 1460.

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.

Cherchez la Femme: Gender-Related Issues in Eighteenth-Century Elmina

Itinerario ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-57
Author(s):  
Natalie Everts
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Black Woman ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
The West ◽  
Indigenous Law ◽  
Descent Group ◽  
The Law ◽  
West India Company

In June 1760 Nicolaas Heinsius, Dutch factor in service of the West India Company (WIC) on the Gold Coast, and commander of fortress Batenstein at Butri, took the law into his own hands. He pawned three slaves owned by the black woman Paraba, because she had, in name of her abusua (matrilineal descent group) appropriated the inheritance of his deceased African concubine and, what is more, she had told Heinsius that she intended to take care of the raising of his Euro-African son. In a letter to his superiors, who resided at Elmina castle, he accounted for his action. Heinsius explained that he acted not for himself but in his little son's interests, the latter being, so he thought, according to indigenous law, the sole heir to his mother's legacy. The reaction he received from the president and the council at Elmina contained a sharp reprimand. The WIC-authorities designated his claim on the inheritance as unlawful and contrary to customary law, and ordered him to immediately return the slaves.

A poisonous plant of the genus Datura (Solanaceae) in an eighteenth-century Danish garden in West Africa

2003 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-159
Author(s):  
Daniel Hopkins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
West African ◽  
Ornamental Plant ◽  
Poisonous Plant ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century

There was disagreement among colonialists about whether the Africans around the Danish West African forts made use of native poisons in the early nineteenth century, but it appears that the Danes themselves may have introduced a poisonous ornamental plant of the genus Datura in one of their own gardens on the Guinea Coast.

Liberty, Insolence and Rum: Cape Coast and the American Revolution

Itinerario ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 18-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ty M. Reese
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Coastal Region ◽  
West African ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Cape Coast ◽  
Internal Factors ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Radical Reconstruction

In early 1787, as American vessels flooded the Gold Coast with rum and as the French worked to extend their coastal position, the Cape Coast Castle governor Thomas Price, reported that the Fante, England's coastal allies, ‘are too politic a people, and too well acquainted with their own interests, ever to wish to confine their trade to one nation’. Price's summation of the issues affecting Anglo-Fante relations on the late eighteenth-century Gold Coast (modern Ghana) provides the foundation for this article. This article contributes to West African coastal historiography in that it examines the relationship between the Gold Coast and the Atlantic World through the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The article expands upon this foundation by narrowing the focus to one Gold Coast trade/administrative enclave. It examines the enclave during a period of change, the 1770s to the early 1800s that culminated in radical reconstruction of coastal relations. The article utilises the Fetu city of Cape Coast, also the administrative centre for England's Company of Merchants Trading to Africa (hereafter CMTA), to examine the relationship between Atlantic (external) and coastal (internal) factors within an African trade enclave. To accomplish this, it eliminates the dichotomy that exists between exploring general coastal trends within a diverse coastal region. This raises a question concerning the consequence of these general trends upon diverse states, cultures and peoples. Do the general trends affect each group similarly or differently and, if so, why? The focus upon one Gold Coast enclave expands our understanding of the consequences caused by the interaction of Atlantic and coastal factors.

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