Introduction^{Footnote 1}

The nineteenth century presents a conundrum for scholars interested in processes of continuity in African history. Bookended by Britain’s abolition of the slave trade (1807) on one end and the onset of formal European colonial rule (1880s–1890s)^{Footnote 2} on the other, the nineteenth century was clearly a period of enormous change for Africa and Africans. Most two-semester undergraduate survey courses in African history are divided somewhere in the nineteenth century (though the date varies from 1800 to 1890) reinforcing the notion that the end of the slave trade and/or the imposition of colonial rule were the single most important turning points in the entire history of Africa. Whether this way of periodizing the African past is pedagogically appropriate or not, it gives primacy to the actions of non-Africans, especially European imperialists, in the making of African history.^{Footnote 3} While Africanists have long made it a point to emphasize the African point of view in African history, this has not been effectively achieved in much of the historiography of the nineteenth century. We have only begun to examine the ways in which African cultural and political institutions were maintained and recreated during this century of enormous change, which often leaves the activities of non-African actors disproportionately foregrounded in nineteenth-century African historiography.

This essay draws attention to important continuities in Fante history between the eighteenth and nineteenth century that have been largely overlooked, and it reviews the historiography of nineteenth-century Ghana in order to evaluate the ways in which the history of the Fante people has been distorted by an overemphasis on external influences. It sheds light on why and how these distortions have come about by identifying the central questions that have driven previous historical research on coastal Ghana in the nineteenth century, and it points to important questions that have yet to be addressed. Finally, it calls for the application of some of the tools of transnational history as a means of foregrounding African agency in this period and showing how local, regional and global processes evolved in dynamic relationships with one another.

The historiography of Ghana (formerly known as the Gold Coast) emphasizes the enormity of change caused by British imperialism and the expansion of the Asante kingdom in the nineteenth century. John Fage, one of the first academic historians to write a history of Ghana, identified Britain’s abolition of the slave trade and the growth of Asante as monumental turning points in the country’s history:

To a great extent, this notion of “an entirely new era” beginning in the early nineteenth century remains uncontested in the historiography of coastal Ghana to this day. While the histories of southeastern Ghana (also known as the upper Slave Coast) and Asante have been interpreted in ways that reveal both continuities and changes over the course of the nineteenth century, the history of the Fante has continued to emphasize change alone.^{Footnote 5} It has been presumed that the combined impact of the abolition of the slave trade, Asante invasion of the coast, Christian missionary activity and British interference in Fante judicial and political affairs totally destroyed Fante culture as it had existed prior to 1807. As a consequence, scholars have failed to consider the ways in which the Fante built upon existing knowledge and institutions in reinventing their social, cultural and political institutions after 1800.

In fact, remarkably little work has been done on nineteenth-century Fante history since the 1950s, apart from studies of nationalist political movements at the end of the century.^{Footnote 6} During the period of British colonial rule (1874–1957), much was written about the numerous “Anglo-Asante Wars,” which took place in Fanteland and its hinterland, and the process of Britain’s claiming first the Gold Coast Protectorate (c. 1850) and then the Gold Coast Colony.^{Footnote 7} African scholars also published historical interpretations of the history of the region during this period, mainly in support of the nationalist movement at the turn of the century.^{Footnote 8} Since Ghana’s independence, however, only two book-length studies of Fanteland have focused on the first three quarters of the nineteenth century: Edward Reynolds’ Trade and Economic Change on the Gold Coast, and Mary McCarthy’s Social Change and the Growth of British Power in the Gold Coast: The Fante States, 1807–1874.^{Footnote 9} These studies provide important analyses of economic, social and political developments in Fanteland during the nineteenth century, and they form a valuable foundation for further study. But, as the titles of both books suggest, they reinforce the notion articulated by Fage that change, rather than continuity, characterized this time period.

The point is not to dispute that tremendous changes occurred in Fante society during the nineteenth century, but rather to argue that the defining political, social and cultural institutions of eighteenth-century Fanteland continued to fundamentally shape Fante history in the nineteenth century, and that these continuities have been overlooked in the historiography. Prior to British colonization at the very end of the nineteenth century, local and regional patterns of life remained very similar to those of the late-eighteenth century.^{Footnote 10} The matrilineal clan (abusua), chiefship (amanhen), and local militia companies (asafo), as well as shifting regional alliances with neighboring polities remained central to Fante life.^{Footnote 11}

Moreover, it must be remembered that many of the transformations in Gold Coast societies that are commonly attributed to the nineteenth century – including the imposition of capitalism, the adoption of European dress and language, and the spread of Christianity – were already clearly visible among the coastal African elite during the eighteenth century. The growth of the literate, Christian, Fante merchant class in the nineteenth century was itself a continuation of an old pattern of cultural mixing. Fante communities continued a centuries-old pattern of gradually incorporating foreign ideas, institutions and material culture, as dictated by local, indigenous needs. It was only after British colonial rule was officially declared (1874) and effectively implemented (after 1901) that substantive changes in Fante social, cultural and political institutions were imposed by a foreign power.

Contextualizing the 1868 Fante Confederation

One of the problems caused by inattention to the continuities in Fante history from the end of the eighteenth century to the late-nineteenth century has been obfuscation of the origins of the Fante Confederation (1868–1872), arguably one of the most important events in the history not only of modern Africa but of the entire African Diaspora. While the Fante Confederation is frequently cited as one of the first overt political acts of resistance against European imperialism in sub-Saharan Africa, the historical roots of the movement have remained largely unexplored.^{Footnote 12} It is well known that the formation of the confederation was part of the Fante’s collective reaction first to the 1865 Report of the Select Committee of the British House of Commons recommending that British policy in West Africa should aim at “ultimate withdrawal” from the region, and second to the 1867 treaty between the British and Dutch by which several trading forts on the Gold Coast were exchanged without the consent of African rulers.^{Footnote 13} Fante leaders anticipated Britain’s abandonment of the Anglo-Fante partnership because of the first document, and they resented the unprecedented incursion on African political authority demonstrated by the second. The Confederation was created in 1868 to support and protect Fante interests, “regardless of British interests or protection,” to oppose the exchange of forts, and to form a government headed by African leaders and independent of the British.^{Footnote 14}

While some historians have hinted at the fact that the Fante Confederation was the culmination of a longer-term historical process and not merely a spontaneous reaction to these activities by the British government, the existing historiography does not link Fante political and cultural institutions from the era of the slave trade to those prevalent in Fanteland in the 1860s.^{Footnote 15} This leaves the impression that the Fante Confederation was somehow a “modern” phenomenon made possible by the recent exposure of Fante elites to western education and literacy, and that it had little grounding in the Fante’s own prior historical experiences. When in fact, the building of political coalitions among coastal elites characterized Gold Coast political history from at least the 1750s, and the mixed Euro-African cultural milieus in which those Fante elites operated was well documented by European traders of the eighteenth century.^{Footnote 16}

The Fante and their ancestors were among the first West African populations to engage deeply in the exchange of commercial, political and cultural ideas and practices spanning the Atlantic.^{Footnote 17} As the point of sale of roughly one million Africans into the transatlantic slave trade, Fante coast towns such as Anomabo, Cape Coast and Elmina were certainly part of the culturally diverse trans-Atlantic network of trade, migration, biological exchange and personal networks that characterize the Atlantic World. In the 1780s and 1790s, Fante political and commercial elites were constantly engaged in high-stakes negotiations and conflicts with Europeans of several nationalities; alliances – including marriages – and “palavers” between Africans and Europeans were fundamental to the operation of the massive trade in enslaved Africans taking place on the Fante coast. During the eighteenth century, coastal elites also organized a coalition-style government for military defense and the protection of their lucrative middleman role in the commercial traffic between the Asante hinterland and the Europeans on the coast, a process which spread the Fante language and arguably gave rise to a regional Fante identity.^{Footnote 18} For these elites, such as Nana Amonu Kuma, omanhene of Anomabo, adapting local political, economic and social institutions to the changing circumstances of life in an Atlantic port town was a familiar practice.^{Footnote 19}

Clearly, then, the cooperation of a group of coastal chiefs in articulating a unitary political policy agenda in the form of the 1868 Fante Confederation was a recurrence of many earlier episodes in Gold Coast history. Equally important is the fact that the use of a European language and European legalistic format for this political project was also a continuation of an old pattern in Fante history. By recognizing these continuities, it becomes possible to view the nineteenth century as a period of both change and continuity, and an era in which Ghana’s “Atlantic creoles” – products of the age of sail – became the nascent African nationalists of the late-nineteenth and twentieth century.

Historiographical Trends: Asante and the British as Focal Points

The existing historical literature about nineteenth-century Ghana concentrates on two main themes, both of which feature prominently in the historiography of Africa more broadly. The first theme is the political and military grandeur of the kingdom of Asante, which has long attracted scholarly attention as one of Africa’s wealthiest and most powerful pre-colonial states. The second is the rise of British imperialism in the 1860s and 1870s and the simultaneous African political movement aimed at self-government/nationhood for the Gold Coast.^{Footnote 20} The formation of political organizations such as the Fante Confederation, the Aborigines’ Rights Protection Society, and the United Gold Coast Convention form an important component of the early history of anti-colonialism and pan-Africanism which have played such crucial roles in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Africa. Tracing the evolution of these themes in the historical literature helps explain why the history of the Fante in the first six decades of the nineteenth century has been neglected and shows the potential benefits to be gained from rethinking this crucial period in Ghanaian history.

Written accounts of the area Europeans referred to as the Gold Coast first appeared as early as 1520 during the era when Portuguese traders were the main European presence on the African coast.^{Footnote 21} During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when traders from several European nations established fortified trading posts on the Gold Coast in pursuit of the gold and slave trades, many more descriptions of the land and people were written.^{Footnote 22} These early accounts were incorporated into the first written histories of Ghana and, as David Henige has shown, into Fante oral traditions.^{Footnote 23} The authors of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century accounts attempted to explain the political and cultural layout of the Gold Coast in order to assist their European and American contemporaries in successfully negotiating trade there.^{Footnote 24} These writers set an important precedent in emphasizing the differences between the coastal and inland populations of the Gold Coast. Coastal Africans – most of whom eventually were referred to collectively as the Fante – were described as skillful traders, well versed in the commercial and cultural practices of what historians now refer to as the Atlantic World. By contrast, the Africans who brought trade “down” from the forest interior were described as naïve about trade and frequently the unwitting victims of commercial scams by their savvier coastal hosts. At the same time, European traders feared and admired the military power and wealth displayed by the inland kingdoms of Akwamu, Denkyira and Asante. These characterizations of the inland and coastal populations have echoed throughout the subsequent historiography of southern Ghana.

Accounts and histories of the Gold Coast written during the nineteenth century reflect Europe’s intensified interest in Asante as a source of “legitimate trade” (gold, ivory, palm oil) and a distinctly condescending view of the Fante. Because the Gold Coast forts were put under direct crown administration from 1821–1828 and 1843–1850, and because the British military presence increased during wars with Asante, military personnel with prior experience elsewhere in the British empire and little interest in, or knowledge of, West Africa were posted on the Gold Coast. This generation of (mostly European) writers viewed the coastal Fante in a less favorable light than their predecessors. Their accounts emphasize the inferiority of the Fante as compared to Asante based on the perception that the Fante failed to form a large, centralized state. The description of Fante by Africanus Horton demonstrates this attitude:

Horton was an African born in Sierra Leone, educated in Britain and serving the British army as an officer and medical doctor on the Gold Coast in the 1860s and 1870s. His view of Fante political organization reflects a growing sense among western-educated Africans as well as Europeans that the hallmark of civilization was a large territorial state.

Equally important for the trajectory of Fante historiography, the nineteenth-century literature vilifies the diverse cultural elements represented in Fante society. Whereas eighteenth-century observers were impressed and sometimes intimidated by the Fante’s familiarity with the commercial and cultural practices of Europeans and of the Atlantic World more broadly, the same cosmopolitanism in this African community was described by increasingly racist nineteenth-century writers as a corruption of African culture. Fante trained at mission schools were dismissed as “semi-educated blacks,” and mixed-race Fante were considered “semi-civilized mulattos.” This transition was part of a broader shift in British attitudes in the nineteenth century when, “Educated or westernized West Africans of whatever sort came to be widely viewed as mimic-men, legatees of a false, pre-colonial start in civilizing Africa.”^{Footnote 26}

During the colonial period, from 1874–1957, the history of the Gold Coast and Asante was of course largely written from the point of view – and for the information – of British imperialists. These works emphasize the military might of Asante and the even greater power and glory of the British, who are presented as bringing civilization to Africa. The Anglo-Asante wars of 1823–1826, 1863–1864, 1873, and 1896 are described in detail, and the racist language is unbridled. An important new narrative was created as well, as colonial authors claimed that British administration of the Gold Coast (Fanteland) actually began early in the nineteenth century, long before the formal declaration of colonial rule in 1874. From the point of view of the British Colonial Office, the Fante had been living within a British Protectorate since the British “rescued” them from Asante overrule in 1824.^{Footnote 27} From the 1840s, British records and correspondence refer to the Fante area as the “British Protectorate,” even though the government of Britain made no official claim to legal rights within, or official promise of military support to, this region. The existence of a British domain called the Gold Coast Protectorate from the 1840s to 1874 has largely been treated as a fact in the historiography ever since.

While colonial writers added the Protectorate narrative to the history of Ghana, they also nearly obliterated the history of Fanteland’s dynamic role in the cosmopolitan transatlantic trade and cultural exchange of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Perhaps because abolition of slavery and slave trading were highlighted as goals of, and justification for, European colonialism in Africa, colonial-era writers scarcely mentioned the history of the Gold Coast prior to 1807, except to offer timeless descriptions of “native custom,” or to congratulate themselves for suppressing slavery in the region. The admiration for the Fante as skilled traders and diplomats, articulated as late as Henry Meredith’s 1812 Gold Coast of Africa, is gone from colonial-era histories. Rather than acknowledging the long history of international trade and cultural interaction in Fanteland, colonial writers presumed that the existence of literate, English-speaking Africans on the Gold Coast was a product of the late-nineteenth and twentieth century colonial encounter. Overall, the view was that these “new” foreign influence were eroding Fante culture. As Wolfson puts it:

Fortunately for historians of nineteenth-century West Africa, a number of African scholars also produced studies of the Gold Coast and its history during the colonial era. John Mensah Sarbah, Joseph Casely Hayford, Carl Christian Reindorf, and others far exceeded their European peers in describing the complexity of cultures and layers of identity that comprised southern Ghanaian societies in the colonial period.^{Footnote 29} These African scholars emphasized the inherent rights of African people to rule themselves and thus directly challenged the racist assumptions of European colonialism. However, in some ways, their accounts of the region’s history reinforced Eurocentric views – particularly by equating civilization with Christianity and western education – which can only be seen as being a product of their time. They tended to share the colonizers’ view that Asante represented the highest form of civilization among all the people of southern Ghana, and thus did not help to counter the historiographical trend toward the obfuscation of Fante history behind a growing obsession with Asante history.

Nationalism and African Power

Beginning in the 1950s, when academic historians began to recognize the importance of writing African history from an African perspective – a project begun much earlier by African and African-American scholars – the history of Ghana was rewritten and reinterpreted in new ways. Independence from colonial rule coincided with scholarship characterized by an emphasis on demonstrating African power, especially in the form of African state-building and resistance to European imperialism. Asante was an ideal case study of the political, commercial, military and cultural achievements of pre-colonial Africa, and historians of Asante used this case study to demonstrate that precolonial African societies were just as politically complex as European ones. The Fante Confederation proved an excellent example of the struggle against European incursion, and historians of the nationalist era resurrected Fante history primarily as a model of African resistance to European authority. The landmark work on this topic is Kimble’s A Political History of Ghana: The Rise of Gold Coast Nationalism 1850–1928, which presents an account of widespread and persistent African resistance to British interference in commercial and political affairs beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century. The Fante are central to Kimble’s work because they spearheaded the political demand for self-government, particularly through the use of legal arguments and documentation. Most scholarship of this era emphasized the importance of these “constitutional” relations between the British and the Fante, thereby implicitly privileging the history of the educated class and the latter part of the nineteenth century, when their numbers were substantial.^{Footnote 30} Important exceptions to this rule are Adu Boahen and Kwame Arhin, who recast the political history of the region in terms of relations between the Asante and Fante states and, secondarily, their diplomatic and military relations with the British.^{Footnote 31} Boahen emphasized the ways in which Fante and Asante leaders pursued their own strategic goals throughout this period, demystifying the then-prevailing view that the Fante had been mere pawns within a British Protectorate. Arhin’s “Rank and Class among the Asante and Fante” directly compared Asante and Fante social hierarchies in order to explain the sharp differences in the historical experiences of these two groups during the nineteenth century.^{Footnote 32} One of the unintended consequences of the focus on resistance in all of the historiography of the nationalist era was the recasting of the nineteenth century as a period characterized by African defeat. In providing a much-needed view of European colonization as an exploitative and unjust imposition on African land and people, this historiography tended to retrospectively infuse nineteenth-century history with a sense of the inevitable encroachment of British power over the Fante and others, if only to better demonstrate African resistance to it.

A secondary emphasis in the nationalist era was on the much earlier history of Ghana’s coastal populations and their dominance in commercial relationships with Europeans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Scholars of Ghanaian birth in particular found abundant evidence in the archives of European trading companies to show that the Fante in particular had been formidable business partners and warriors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.^{Footnote 33} The work of Kwame Daaku and others detailed the importance of Ghana’s gold reserves in the early years of Europe’s trade with Africa and highlighted the roles of powerful African “merchant princes” in the seventeenth century.^{Footnote 34} While these works revived scholarly knowledge of an important aspect of Fante (and Ghanaian) precolonial history, they effectively separated the era of the transatlantic gold trade from subsequent periods in Ghana’s history by largely avoiding the topic of the slave trade. For reasons that are easy to understand, Africanist historians in the 1960s and 1970s were not particularly keen to highlight the participation of Africans in the transatlantic slave trade. And since it was gold, rather than slaves, that attracted Europeans to Ghana’s shores and motivated the construction of her now-famous trading forts and castles in the seventeenth century, these historians tended to emphasize the gold trade and its heyday, the seventeenth century. The history of the coast in the eighteenth century and the participation of Fante and Asante as slave raiders and brokers remained relatively subdued in this literature, prohibiting an understanding of continuities between the era of the “merchant princes” of the gold trade and the equally savvy traders and political leaders of the eighteenth century and beyond.^{Footnote 35}

New Directions

In the past three decades, the historiography of Asante has remained dynamic and abundant while works on Fante history have remained scarce. Asante historiography is exceptional within Africanist historiography for the way in which it analyzes continuity over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth century and blurs the distinction between “traditional” and “modern” African culture.^{Footnote 36} In the decades since Wilks’ Reference Wilks1975 landmark work, historical scholarship on Asante has developed rich debates and reinterpretations of Asante state and society and engaged theoretical approaches from other sub-fields of history and from other disciplines. Scholars have shown how Asante institutions have evolved and changed right up to the twenty-first century, as the Asante kingdom has remained an active participant in the political and cultural scene of modern Ghana.^{Footnote 37}

The handful of works published since the 1980s concerning Fanteland in the nineteenth century address some important issues beyond the “trade and politics” agendas of the nationalist era, but they fail to show continuity across the period from the late-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, and they reinforce the notion that the expansion of British power was the driving force in nineteenth-century Fante history. Edward Reynolds’ Trade and Economic Change on the Gold Coast, 1807–1874 addresses the changing economic conditions in southern Ghana from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the declaration of formal colonial rule, and also describes the rise and decline of a wealthy class of African merchants who received credit directly from European firms abroad. The study provides a helpful analysis of the relative importance of slavery and slave trading in the Gold Coast economy and thus draws an important connection between the economic history of the Gold Coast in the nineteenth century and the earlier history of transatlantic trade. Reynolds is primarily concerned with tracing “economic progress” and the emergence of Ghana’s “modern economy,” but encompasses social change – especially the expansion of western-style schools and Christian missions – within this definition.

Mary McCarthy’s Social Change and the Growth of British Power on the Gold Coast is the most recent book-length study to focus on Fante social and political history in the nineteenth century and remains the standard reference work on the subject. McCarthy points toward the broader chronological and geographical scopes that would allow a richer understanding of the evolution of the Fante Confederation, but falls short of drawing direct connections. She observes in the final pages of her study that Fante political activity in the late-nineteenth century was rooted in much older Fante political culture, claiming that the 1868 Fante Confederation was “entirely consistent with the behavior of Fante chiefs in the past” and “an innovative attempt to combine modern skills and methods with ancient Fante forms and institutions.”^{Footnote 38} But the central argument of her study is that the adoption of European cultural values and practices – especially Christianity, education and capitalism – destabilized Fante society over the course of the nineteenth century. She concludes that the social changes associated with European culture contact fostered British interference in Fante affairs to the extent that the British were prevented from “extricating themselves” from the Gold Coast, and therefore had no choice but to claim colonial rule. This interpretation precludes the possibility of viewing the cultural interaction and exchange as integral to the continued evolution of Fante culture and politics, as it had been throughout the eighteenth century.

Other important recent works that address this subject offer alternative ways of thinking about Fante history but do not directly address the problem of linking the Fante Confederation with earlier phases of Fante history. Kwame Arhin’s more recent work explores the continuities in political traditions and social structure throughout the precolonial, colonial and postcolonial periods in southern Ghana.^{Footnote 39} This work is of limited use in the study of Fante history, however, because Arhin treats the history of all of the Akan-speaking people – including Fante, Asante and others – as one. This practice of conflating the history of Akan speakers is also apparent in the work of Kwasi Konadu and reflects the growing sense of shared identity among Akan speakers in Ghana today. Ray Kea’s recent A Cultural and Social History of Ghana makes a major contribution to the literature by assembling several insightful biographies that reveal the fluid nature of power in the larger region at various points in time during the three centuries prior to British colonization.^{Footnote 40}

This review of the historiography of southern Ghana suggests that, for a variety of reasons, historians have neglected Fante history between the era of the maritime gold trade (c. 1450–1720) and the colonial period. Perhaps the most obvious reason for this is the so-called “hinterland bias,” or tendency to focus on the history of the larger, more spectacular Asante kingdom. Historians of pre-colonial Africa in general have been more inclined to study state-building societies than the decentralized or stateless groups. Another important factor is a phenomenon described by John Parker in which “succeeding generations of observers” have viewed the urban areas of coastal West Africa as “not being the ‘real’ Africa.”^{Footnote 41} Like Accra, the subject of Parker’s study, the towns along the Fante coast have long been described in the documentary record as markedly different from the rural and inland regions, and often as “corrupted” by outside influences – especially European ones. Another factor is the avoidance of the slave trade as an element of Ghanaian history. As Bayo Holsey has shown, Ghanaians have been reluctant to acknowledge slavery and the slave trade as part of their national history;^{Footnote 42} so too have most historians of Ghana apparently respected this preference for nondisclosure.^{Footnote 43}

Even as the Fante are celebrated as early African nationalists and Pan-Africanists, then, their history has been written in a way that emphasizes the collapse of their political culture in the nineteenth century and denies the continued importance of the Fante’s vast experience in transatlantic commercial, cultural and diplomatic engagement. The view put forward in the 1950s still largely prevails:

While it is of course true that the nineteenth century ended with near-total domination of Fante political and commercial life by British imperialists, the emphasis in the current historiography on the persistent growth of British power over the course of the nineteenth century denies the existence of important processes of growth and continuity in the areas of Fante political, social and cultural life. As a result, we have yet to appreciate the ways in which those continuities helped to shape the Fante response to this unprecedented foreign incursion.

Atlantic Africa in the Nineteenth Century

One of the most important advancements in scholarly understanding of Africa’s precolonial history has developed from the study of commercial and cultural exchanges that connected coastal African societies with those of Asia, Europe and the Americas via maritime trade networks that spanned the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. Scholars of these connections around the Atlantic, often referred to as the Atlantic World, have debunked the notion that Africa’s connections with Europe and the Americas before the nineteenth century were only important insofar as Africa was a source of enslaved laborers.^{Footnote 45} They have demonstrated that trade, migration and interpersonal relationships across the Atlantic had enormous impacts on the cultures, economies and forms of government of people on all four continents around the Atlantic basin, including Africa. Equally important, scholars of the Atlantic world have shown that in a variety of ways, Africans in Africa and abroad have played important roles in shaping these vast historical changes.^{Footnote 46} The transnational approach has also enabled the development of rich analyses focused on the African Diaspora, that is to say the migration and cultures of people of African origin worldwide, and the related concept of the Black Atlantic.^{Footnote 47}

The view of coastal West Africa as a place deeply connected to other world regions and especially to the African Diaspora is precisely what is needed to enrich our understanding of Fante history in the nineteenth century. In spite of the monumental changes introduced in 1807 by Asante’s invasion of the Gold Coast and Britain’s abolition of the slave trade, Fanteland continued to be the site of several ports of trade visited regularly by ships bound to or from Europe, South America, and the Caribbean until the 1870s, when the capital of the British Gold Coast Colony was relocated from Cape Coast to Accra. The cosmopolitan urban communities that inhabited these port towns continued to be members of an “Atlantic community” within which information and ideas, as well as trade goods and genetic matter continued to circulate. In fact, the increased adoption of literacy among Fante combined with the technological advancements in printing and ocean transport probably vastly increased access to international business and information after 1807, at least for the educated elite in Fanteland. Why, then, has the historiography of nineteenth-century Fante remained limited to localized analyses of the Fante, Asante and British government personnel on the Gold Coast?

One possible explanation is that historians have defined the concept of the Atlantic World in a way that excludes nineteenth-century Africa. The chronology of the Atlantic World is, appropriately, a matter of debate, but for many historians the phenomenon of the Atlantic World simply ceased to exist beyond the eighteenth century.^{Footnote 48} More troubling is the way in which studies that do extend into the nineteenth century but either exclude Africa or, worse, include Africa only as a stage upon which Europeans acted.^{Footnote 49} This is understandable to the extent that some of the principal events and historical developments in the early nineteenth century that connected people across the Atlantic – and perhaps especially people of African descent – do not appear to involve Africans in Africa to a great extent. Important works focusing on the so-called Age of Revolutions, for example, emphasize the ways in which political and ideological movements oriented around the ideas of liberty and freedom swept across many parts of Europe and the Americas in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.^{Footnote 50} Far from taking the helm of the international abolition movement, most African societies increased their use of slave labor in the nineteenth century. Nor was this a time of democracy-building in Africa. In what has been called the “crisis of adaptation,” many African societies became more hierarchical and exploitative after the abolition of the slave trade.^{Footnote 51} To the extent that the Atlantic world was riding a wave of egalitarianism and abolition, then, Africa was not on the boat.

In spite of these historical divergences, however, it should not be assumed that Africans in Africa were not affected by, or involved in, the changes taking place in the broader Atlantic and African Diasporic communities. On the contrary, the constitution created by the Fante Confederation, with its call for a government with elected officials, a National Assembly, and for social and economic improvement programs is evidence that some African populations were very much involved in the development of ideas about representative government and nationhood at this time. If historians ask, “What became of the Gold Coast’s Atlantic creoles in the nineteenth century?” rather than, “How did the British rise to power?” or “How did the Fante resist the rise of British power?,” then it will be possible to examine the continuities in the Fante’s complex interdependent relationships within multiple interconnected “worlds” (America, Europe and Africa) in the nineteenth century.^{Footnote 52} These continuities constitute the process by which the Gold Coast’s Atlantic creoles evolved into Ghana’s African nationalists.

An initial inquiry reveals several major developments unfolding on a larger transcontinental stage that facilitated the continued flow of people and ideas in and out of the Gold Coast in the first three quarters of the nineteenth century.^{Footnote 53} The expansion of Christian missionary activity had the unintended consequence of giving birth to the rise of a new breed of schools and churches in which African teachers and religious leaders disseminated their own brand of education and Christianity in Fanteland.^{Footnote 54} Britain’s attempts to jointly administer her Gold Coast forts and the Sierra Leone colony during the 1820s and 1840s brought Fante into constant contact with Sierra Leoneans such as Africanus Horton, who were on the cutting edge of the nascent anti-racist and pan-African ideologies and political movements emerging in the African Diaspora at the time.^{Footnote 55} Fante merchants traveling to Britain for business or education had opportunities to share ideas and political strategies with black Americans, many of whom relocated to Britain after the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act and the United States’ 1850 Fugitive Slave Act to pursue what Richard Blackett calls “the transatlantic abolition movement.”^{Footnote 56} And in nearby Accra, a settlement of Brazilian ex-slaves in the 1830s introduced yet another wave of African Diaspora experiences and ideologies into Gold Coast urban communities.