Slaves, Danes and African Coast Society: The Danish Slave Trade from West Africa and Afro-Danish Relations on the Eighteenth-Century Gold Coast

1996 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 433
Author(s):  
Sandra E. Greene ◽  
Per O. Hernaes
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
African Coast

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.

scholarly journals The English Establishments on the Gold Coast in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century

1922 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 167-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eveline C. Martin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
West African ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
National Pride ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
African Coast ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many

Among the many unexplored fields in the history of the Outer Empire, the British settlements on the West African coast, until the last twenty years of the eighteenth century, have been the most neglected. The main course of English relations with that coast from earliest times to the end of the nineteenth century has been told in an admirable survey by Sir Charles Lucas, and several histories of the Gold Coast exist. None of these sources, however, have provided more than an outline sketch of the English settlements in West Africa, and the method of government and organisation by which they were maintained in the eighteenth century has not been examined. The most recent history of the Gold Coast, published in 1910 by Mr. Walton Claridge, is mainly occupied with nineteenth-century history, and no attempt is made by him to give anything but a cursory description of government in the previous century. Many other surveys of European progress in Africa have been written, but in all of them the treatment of the eighteenth century is slight. It is easy to account for this neglect. The story of the coast is bound up with the most discreditable of undertakings that mark the expansion of the Empire—the negro slave [trade—and Lecky's brief account of the English relations with West Africa would not encourage research into a subject so humiliating to national pride.

The Royal African Company of England's West African Correspondence, 1681-1699

1993 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 173-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Law
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
West African ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Original Form ◽  
Cape Coast ◽  
General Terms ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
African Coast ◽  
History Of

This paper draws attention to an ambitious project in the publication of source material for the precolonial history of West Africa, which has recently been approved for inclusion in the Fontes Historiae Africanae series of the British Academy. In addition to self-promotion, however, I wish also to take the opportunity to air some of the problems of editorial strategy and choice which arise with regard to the editing and presentation of this material, in the hope of provoking some helpful feedback on these issues.The material to be published consists of correspondence of the Royal African Company of England relating to the West African coast in the late seventeenth century. The history of the Royal African Company (hereafter RAC) is in general terms well known, especially through the pioneering (and still not superseded) study by K.G. Davies (1957). The Company was chartered in 1672 with a legal monopoly of English trade with Africa. Its headquarters in West Africa was at Cape Coast (or, in the original form of the name, Cabo Corso) Castle on the Gold Coast, and it maintained forts or factories not only on the Gold Coast itself, but also at the Gambia, in Sierra Leone, and at Offra and Whydah on the Slave Coast. It lost its monopoly of the African trade in 1698, and thereafter went into decline, effectively ceasing to operate as a trading concern in the 1720s, although it continued to manage the English possessions on the coast of West Africa until it was replaced by a regulated company (i.e., one open to all traders), the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, in 1750.

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.

France and the Slave Trade

2020 ◽  
pp. 60-78
Author(s):  
Alan Forrest
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Short Overview ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Triangular Trade

The chapter begins with a short overview of France’s involvement in the Atlantic slave trade and shows how, by the second half of the eighteenth century, more and more merchants and investors became dazzled by the profits offered by a successful slave voyage. All the Atlantic ports engaged in the slave trade, though Nantes had the highest level of slaving and the greatest dependence on the triangular trade with west Africa and the Caribbean. The economics of a slave voyage are analysed, as well as the cargoes purchased for trading in Africa; the captains’ involvement in slave markets in both West Africa and the Caribbean; the risks run by the slave ships and their crews during the voyage; and the conditions that were endured below deck during the Middle Passage.

Africans and Europeans in West Africa: Elminans and Dutchmen on the Gold Coast during the Eighteenth Century

1992 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 150
Author(s):  
Roger B. Beck ◽  
Harvey M. Feinberg ◽  
Johannes Menne Postma ◽  
Richard Price
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Gold Coast

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.

“Legitimate commerce” in the Eighteenth Century: The Royal African Company of England Under the Duke of Chandos, 1720–1726

2013 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 544-578 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew David Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Lower Cost ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Mineral Resources ◽  
Strategic Decision ◽  
Commodity Trade ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
British Trade ◽  
Slave Traders

Following the loss in 1712 of its previous monopoly over British trade with West Africa, the Royal African Company found itself unable to compete with smaller, lower-cost British slave traders and nearly collapsed entirely. Salvation seemed to arrive in 1720 in the person of James Brydges, the Duke of Chandos, who led a massive re-capitalization of the company and made the strategic decision to move its focus to the commodity trade between Europe and Africa and on the search for new botanical and mineral resources in Africa itself. While Chandos directed the RAC’s employees in implementing this radical new scheme, he kept it secret from his fellow shareholders, leading them to believe that his plans were aimed at revitalizing the company’s mature but declining line of business in the transatlantic slave trade. The Duke’s strategy, however, proved overly ambitious and failed to reverse the company’s decline.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document