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.

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.

Shintō Shrines and Secularism in Modern Japan, 1890–1945

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 128-156
Author(s):  
Karli Shimizu
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political System ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The West ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Secular Institution ◽  
The Government ◽  
Academic Discourses

From the late eighteenth century to WWII, shrine Shintō came to be seen as a secular institution by the government, academics, and activists in Japan (Isomae 2014; Josephson 2012, Maxey 2014). However, research thus far has largely focused on the political and academic discourses surrounding the development of this idea. This article contributes to this discussion by examining how a prominent modern Shintō shrine, Kashihara Jingū founded in 1890, was conceived of and treated as secular. It also explores how Kashihara Jingū communicated an alternate sense of space and time in line with a new Japanese secularity. This Shintō-based secularity, which located shrines as public, historical, and modern, was formulated in antagonism to the West and had an influence that extended across the Japanese sphere. The shrine also serves as a case study of how the modern political system of secularism functioned in a non-western nation-state.

Tracking the growth of government securities investing in early modern England and Wales

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-114
Author(s):  
Carole Shammas
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Stock Exchange ◽  
Government Debt ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
Trading Company ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Right ◽  
Private Loans

Interest in the growth of tradeable securities in early modern Britain, especially its relationship to economic development and the funding of government debt, has centered mainly on the borrower – whether it be trading company, industrial enterprise, or the state. This article directs attention to the investor, using Charity Commission Reports for England and Wales that document a dramatic mid-eighteenth-century shift by donors and trustees from investments in real estate and rent charges to perpetual government annuities, mainly 3 percent Consols. The heavy investment in this public debt product is what ultimately prompted the creation of the London Stock Exchange in 1801.In analyzing this shift, which occurred among the propertied in all regions of the nation, not just the metropolis or among corporate entities and the mercantile community, I consider both what made the annuities increasingly attractive for charitable trusts and the alternatives – real estate and private loans secured by mortgage or other means – more problematic. Legal changes, I argue, played a role in the transformation, especially the Charitable Uses Act of 1736, which made charitable devises of real estate very difficult and probably resulted in reduced investment in human capital and less wealth redistribution. Regions varied, however, in the degree to which they switched from real estate in the latter part of the eighteenth century; they also differed in the extent to which the switch resulted in more gifts of interest-bearing loans as well.Admittedly, the changes documented in this article concern only one type of depository for assets, charitable trusts. The appeal of these annuities, however, could extend to investments needed for other purposes such as postmortem payments to dependents. Moreover, the fall-off in demand for real estate in trusts correlates with GDP estimates showing a steady decline in income from real assets after 1755 and what some have noted in this period as a puzzle – the lack of an increased rate of return on rents and private loans at a time of robust investment in government debt. Most importantly, though, the transition demonstrates the ability of the government to induce a broad spectrum of the propertied population to invest in securities, if the vehicle they offered had the right characteristics, which were not necessarily highest yield or liquidity without loss in value.

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.

The Ondo road Eastwards of Lagos,c. 1870–95

1969 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 581-598 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. A. Akintoye
Keyword(s):  
Guinea Coast ◽  
The West ◽  
Trade Routes ◽  
Missionary Work ◽  
The People ◽  
British Colony ◽  
History Of ◽  
Christian Missionary ◽  
The Government ◽  
Almost All

Trade with European merchants along the Guinea Coast was very important in the history of the Yoruba in the nineteenth century. But until 1870 almost all this trade was done by the western Yoruba peoples. All the important ports (Porto Novo, Badagry and Lagos) were located on the western sea-board of the Yoruba country, and from these ports trade routes radiated inland. Moreover, along the routes, Christian missionary evangelism spread. The eastern Yoruba country remained out of the stream of these formative developments.About 1870, however, owing to obstructions to trade on the western routes, the government of the British colony of Lagos tried to open a new route in the east as a roundabout means of tapping the main centres of trade in the west. But this route, the Ondo Road, soon became a great formative force in the lives of the peoples of the eastern Yoruba provinces. Compared with the main western routes, the trade on the new route was quite small. Nevertheless, its demands resulted in vastly increased productivity both in the agriculture and local manufactures of the people. Also it was along this route that missionary work—as evidenced by the building of mission stations, churches and schools—at last began to affect the eastern Yoruba areas.

The ecology of Lagos Lagoon I. The lagoons of the Guinea Coast

1958 ◽  
Vol 241 (683) ◽  
pp. 307-318 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Aerial Survey ◽  
Large Rivers ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
The West ◽  
Coast Line ◽  
The Past ◽  
Sand Ridges ◽  
Lagos Lagoon ◽  
Lagoon Systems

In this account of the lagoon systems of the Guinea Coast of West Africa, the distribution of lagoons is discussed in relation to the direction of the coast-line and the quarter of the dominant wind. Two types of lagoon are recognized according to the presence or absence of large rivers in the different regions. An aerial survey of the Dahomey and Western Nigerian lagoon systems has been made, and three types of beach accretion responsible for the seaward advance of the shore are described. It has been shown that the pattern of vegetation on lagoon deposits, being governed by the nature of the soil, can be used to indicate the position of the past beaches, sand ridges, spits and lagoons. An area to the west of Lagos has been studied by this method and a map prepared to show the successive advances of the shore

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.

Willem Bosman's New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea: How Accurate is It?

1974 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 101-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert van Dantzig
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Western World ◽  
Small State ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
The West ◽  
Strong Position ◽  
Increasing Demand ◽  
West India Company ◽  
East West

When Willem Bosman wrote his Naauwkeurige Beschryving van de Guinese- Goud-Tand- en Slavekust in 1702 the Guinea coast was perhaps enjoying more public interest in Europe than ever before. The Gold Coast and its interior had long appealed to the imagination of the western world, because it was one of the few gold-producing areas open to traders of all nations. But around 1700 interest in the whole coast of west Africa, particularly the east-west stretch or ‘Lower Guinea,’ further increased because of the rapidly increasing demand in the West Indies and Latin America for slaves from that area. As a matter of fact the “Asiento question” was one of the major issues at stake at the beginning of the War of the Spanish Succession. Bosman, late Chief Merchant on behalf of the Dutch West India Company on the coast of Guinea, was in an excellent position to satisfy public curiosity.Dutch contacts with the lower Guinea coast dated from 1595 when the then newly-emerging Republic of the Northern Netherlands or the United Provinces was badly in need of a regular supply of gold in order to finance its war efforts against the Spanish crown. Dutch trade expanded quickly in west Africa, at the expense of the Portuguese, who pretended to have a trade monopoly in the area. On the Gold Coast in particular the Portuguese were in a strong position, with fixed bases in the form of their castle at Sao Jorge da Mina (later Elmina) and supporting forts at Shama and Axim. But Portugal had been under the Spanish crown since 1580 and the Dutch considered their overseas possessions as legal prey and the undermining of their trade as a valid political aim. The Dutch were able to bring cheaper and better trade goods to the coast, and this prompted the ruler of the small state of Asebu near Elmina to defy openly the supposedly exclusive rights of the Portuguese, and, in 1612, to invite the Dutch to build a fort of their own at Mori. A Dutch attack in 1625 on the great castle of Elmina failed, but in 1637 they were successful and by 1641 they had expelled the Portuguese from their last possessions on the Guinea coast. But the Dutch were never able to enjoy the kind of monopolistic position the Portuguese had had; in 1631 the English built their first Gold Coast fort at Cormantin and other nations soon joined the rush to the profitable gold trade. By the end of the century no fewer than twenty-six fortified trade posts, belonging to the chartered companies of five nations, littered the coastline.

Connacht in the eighteenth century

1958 ◽  
Vol 11 (42) ◽  
pp. 116-133
Author(s):  
J.G. Simms
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Substantial Part ◽  
The West ◽  
Individual Character ◽  
The Government ◽  
Constant Source

Connacht in the eighteenth century was regarded as the most remote and the most catholic part of Ireland. These two qualities gave the region a very individual character, and the few travellers who ventured to cross the Shannon had the sensation of entering another world. This did not apply to two of the five counties—Leitrim and Sligo, which had been allotted tothe soldiers of the parliamentary army in the Cromwellian settlement and for this reason were not typical of the province. The essential Connacht lay beyond the Shannon in the counties of Galway, Mayo and Roscommon, the greater part of which had been reserved for catholic landowners in the Cromwellian settlement. The result of this arrangement was to leave the catholic gentry in a much stronger position in Connacht than in the rest of Ireland. This position remained largely unshaken by the Jacobite war, as the treaty of Limerick, the terms of the surrender of Galway, and their own solidarity protected most of the Connacht landholders from confiscation at the end of the war.When the eighteenth century began, several hundred catholic landholders were in occupation of a substantial part of Galway and Mayo and, to a lesser degree, of Roscommon. This situation was a constant source of anxiety to the authorities, who from time to time were alarmed about the prospect of a French landing in the west supported by catholic landlords and catholic peasants. It was said that catholics in Connacht outnumbered protestants by fifty to one and that in some counties there were so few protestant freeholders to serve on juries that the region could scarcely be held to acknowledge the authority of the government.

The Forest and Agriculture in West Africa

1962 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. B. Morgan
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
West African ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
The West ◽  
Western Portion

A recent generalization on cropping and cultivation in Africa reduces the variety of environmental types to two: ‘savannahs’ and ‘forest and woodland’. Another work simplifies West African anthropology by introducing two regions linguistic in origin: the West Sudan and the Guinea Coast. The latter, misleadingly shown as the western portion of a ‘yam belt’ or ‘corridor’, includes the ‘forest’ and a small southern portion of the ‘savannah’. Such regional generalizations invite critical assessment of the relationships displayed between crops, agriculture and the environments. It is proposed to take one of these last as termed above: the ‘forest and woodland’.

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