Focus on the European Side

2018 ◽  
pp. 113-128
Author(s):  
Finn Fuglestad
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Local Conditions ◽  
European Side

The Portuguese were (from 1471) the European “pioneers” everywhere in West Africa. They were interested in gold, hence the region called ‘the Gold Coast’ (Ghana today). The slave trade, and especially the Slave Coast, came much later, the Slave Coast because of the forbidding local conditions that long dissuaded the Europeans (they had in fact to be invited in). Rivalry between the Europeans meant that (from the 1590s) the Dutch, the English, the French and others challenged the Portuguese monopoly with success. The needs of the “sugar revolution” in America did the rest. But was it the offer of slaves from Africa which made that revolution possible? The inter-European rivalries on the coast may have influenced relations between the European powers to a greater extent than is usually admitted.

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.

Hawkins' Hoax? A Sequel to “Drake's Fake”

1991 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 83-91
Author(s):  
J. D. Fage
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
North American ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Atlantic History ◽  
Atlantic Trade ◽  
Father And Son

English schoolchildren were once brought up on tales of the exploits of Drake and the two Hawkins, father and son, leaders of the English seafaring adventures who invaded the monopolies of Atlantic trade claimed by the Iberian monarchs, who signed Philip II's beard, and who eventually brought his great Armada to destruction. Strangely enough, some two centuries later the names Drake and Hawkins would seem to reappear in Atlantic history as those of two North American adventurers who sought to profit in the slave trade from West Africa.Not so long ago my friend and colleague T. C. McCaskie presented in History in Africa grounds for believing to be spurious inventions those parts of the published reminiscences of Richard Drake which deal with Asante, the great kingdom behind the Gold Coast (on which he may well have traded), and which he claimed to have visited in 1839. Unlikely though it may seem, there would also appear to be substantial grounds for believing that Joseph Hawkins' account of a trip into the interior of West Africa, which he claimed to have made from the Rio Nunez in 1795, is also at least in some measure an invention.

The Slave Trade and Coastal West Africa

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth G. Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Heritage Tourism ◽  
West African ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
African Countries ◽  
Archaeological Work

The Atlantic slave trade has been the focus of archaeological work in a number of West African countries. Much of the work has emphasized the impressive trade castles of the Ghana coast, where extensive European constructions demonstrate the importance of the slave trade in the regions’ history. Work has also been conducted on other settings, including in Bénin, where African agency manifested itself differently than on the Gold Coast of modern Ghana; Sierra Leone and Gambia, where European trading establishments were typically smaller; and Guinea, where the ‘illegal’ slave trade of the nineteenth century blossomed. Many of these sites of enslavement have become important parts of local heritage, as well as a global heritage of African-descended people and the heritage tourism associated with the African Diaspora.

The Financing of the Ashanti Expansion (1700–1820)

Africa ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kwame Arhin
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Coastal Areas ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Opening Paragraph

Opening ParagraphThe arrival of Europeans, and the introduction of guns, first in the coastal areas JL and then into the interior of West Africa, altered the nature of warfare. Already in the seventeenth century, the Akan-Fanti, Akim, Akwamu, and other peoples on the Gold Coast no longer relied entirely on bows and arrows, spears, and javelins which were the traditional weapons but used guns and even a few cannon. Besides the change in weapons, wars were undertaken on a larger scale than ever before—a situation which was aggravated by participation in the slave trade. Among the peoples of the Gold Coast, now Ghana, none excelled the Ashanti in either the scale or intensity of their fighting. From the turn of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, they fought major wars of conquest and minor ones of consolidation throughout the area of present-day Ghana, and after 1820 they were involved in four major clashes with the British until the latter dissolved their kingdom in 1900.

The Original Manuscript Version of William Snelgrave's New Account of Some Parts of Guinea

1990 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 367-372 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Law
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
West African ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Detailed Account ◽  
The West ◽  
Legal Proceedings ◽  
Original Manuscript ◽  
Principal Subject

Captain William Snelgrave's A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea, and the Slave Trade, first published in 1734, is a work well known to historians of West Africa. The largest and most valuable section of it comprises a detailed account of voyages by the author in 1727 and 1730 to the ports of Whydah and Jakin on the Slave Coast, then recently conquered by Dahomey, and offers the earliest extended account of the latter kingdom to be published. The information in Snelgrave's book can also be supplemented by records of testimony which he provided on two occasions, in 1726 and 1731, before the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations in London.Snelgrave was a slave-trading captain with, at the time of his book's publication, some thirty years' experience of the West African trade. The details of his career are documented principally from his book, which in addition to the voyages of 1727 and 1730 (which form its principal subject), also alludes to several earlier slave-trading voyages undertaken by him. Snelgrave's first voyage to Africa, in which he served as purser on a ship commanded by his father, was to Old Calabar in 1704; a second voyage to Old Calabar was undertaken in 1713, a voyage to Sierra Leone (on which Snelgrave was captured by pirates) in 1719, and a voyage to the Gold Coast in 1721-22. This is not, however, a comprehensive catalog of Snelgrave's voyages, since he also alludes to having visited Whydah on “several voyages” before 1727. Other evidence documents two such earlier voyages by Snelgrave to Whydah, in 1717 and 1725. He was apparently still alive in 1735, the year after the publication of his book, when he is mentioned among a group of people involved in legal proceedings to press claims on the estate of Patrick West, a recently deceased merchant of Antigua.

West Africa

2018 ◽  
pp. 98-120
Author(s):  
Wim Klooster ◽  
Gert Oostindie
Keyword(s):  
Mortality Rate ◽  
West Africa ◽  
High Mortality ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Dutch Society ◽  
Caribbean Islands ◽  
The Caribbean

The Dutch forts in West Africa were a crucial link in the Dutch gold and ivory trades, and even if the Gold Coast never dominated the Dutch slave trade, the forts were indispensable to the functioning of the commerce in enslaved Africans. The nature of Dutch “society” in this area was distinct from that in Guiana or the Caribbean islands. Housing only sojourners, not settlers, the forts were home almost exclusively to male Europeans. Their high mortality rate – and eagerness to return to Europe – helped shape a community in perpetual flux, as its individual members were constantly replaced by newcomers, and, increasingly, Eurafricans.

A Microcosm of Why Africans sold Slaves: Akan Consumption Patterns in the 1770s.

1987 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 377-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Metcalf
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Consumption Patterns ◽  
Stages Of Development ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Slave Raids ◽  
The Impact

The European goods which Africans consumed in the slave trade era tell us much about the African societies which imported them. However the study of the subject has involved much confusion through the application of fragmentary evidence from different societies in different stages of development towards the fashioning of broad hypotheses about the impact of the trade on West Africa as a whole. It is important therefore, when the evidence is available, to study each society and each group of African middlemen individually as well as within the wider context.The papers (especially the barter records) of Richard Miles throw a good deal of light on one such microcosm: the Akan people of the Gold Coast in the second half of the eighteenth century. The Fante middlemen with whom Miles dealt required, for virtually every barter, an assortment of goods from five major categories: hardware, currencies, textiles, luxury items, arms and ammunition. Though all these categories were necessary for the trade, it is notable that textiles were far and away the dominant commodity desired by the Akan. Guns were in surprisingly low demand during this period which suggests that the Akan slave producers (principally the Asante) had no difficulty raising slaves through tribute in peacetime and were not forced to rely on wars and slave-raids.Miles's documents also make it clear that generalizations drawn from the Gold Coast in this period cannot be extended automatically to other areas; Akan history tells us that neither can they be extended on the Gold Coast into a different era.

Slave Traders by Invitation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Finn Fuglestad
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Human Settlement ◽  
Local Setting ◽  
Slave Traders ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade

The small Slave Coast between the river Volta and Lagos, and especially its central part around Ouidah, was the epicentre of the slave trade in West Africa. But it was also an inhospitable, surf-ridden coastline, subject to crashing breakers and devoid of permanent human settlement. Nor was it easily accessible from the interior due to a lagoon which ran parallel to the coast. The local inhabitants were not only sheltered against incursions from the sea, but were also locked off from it. Yet, paradoxically, this small coastline witnessed a thriving long-term commercial relationship between Europeans and Africans, based on the trans-Atlantic slave trade. How did it come about? How was it all organized? Dahomey is usually cited as the Slave Coast's archetypical slave raiding and slave trading polity. An originally inland realm, it was a latecomer to the slave trade, and simply incorporated a pre-existing system by dint of military prowess, which ultimately was to prove radically counterproductive. Dahomey, which never controlled more than half of the region we call the Slave Coast, represented an anomaly in the local setting, an anomaly the author seeks to define and to explain.

PAWNSHIP, DEBT, AND ‘FREEDOM’ IN ATLANTIC AFRICA DURING THE ERA OF THE SLAVE TRADE: A REASSESSMENT

2014 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul E. Lovejoy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
Congo River

AbstractA reassessment of the institution of pawnship in Africa for the period from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century tightens the reference to situations in which individuals were held as collateral for debts that had been incurred by others, usually relatives. Contrary to the assumptions of some scholars, pawnship was not related to poverty and enslavement for debt but rather to commercial liquidity and the mechanisms by which funds were acquired to promote trade or to cover the expenses of funerals, weddings, and religious obligations. A distinction is made, therefore, between enslavement for debt and pawnship. It is demonstrated that pawnship characterized trade with European and American ships in many parts of Atlantic Africa, but not everywhere. While pawnship was common north of the Congo River, at Gabon, Cameroon, Calabar, the interior of the Bights of Biafra and Benin, the Gold Coast, and the upper Guinea coast, it was illegal in most of Muslim Africa and the Portuguese colony of Angola, while it was not used in commercial dealings with Europeans at Bonny, Ouidah, and other places.

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