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From Atlantic Creoles to African Nationalists: Reflections on the Historiography of Nineteenth-Century Fanteland

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2014

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Abstract

This essay argues that the history of southern Ghana exhibits far more continuity from the era of the slave trade to the time of British colonization in the late-nineteenth century than one can find in the existing historiography. Emphases on the expansion of the Asante kingdom and on the increased activity of European missionaries, capitalists, and bureaucrats have obscured the steady growth of indigenous cultural, political and social institutions which culminated in the formation of the Fante Confederation of 1868.

Résumé

Contrairement à ce que soutient l'historiographie actuelle, il existe une grande continuité dans l'histoire du Ghana du sud entre l'époque de la traite des esclaves et la colonisation britannique à la fin du XIX-ième siècle. L'importance accordée à l'expansion du royaume Ashanti et aux missionnaires, capitalistes et bureaucrates européens cache la croissance régulière des institutions culturelles, politiques et sociales locales qui culminèrent avec la formation de la Confédération des Fanti en 1868.

Type
Critical Historiography
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2014 

IntroductionFootnote 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:

Since it was essentially the slave trade which had brought representatives of [European] nations to the Gold Coast, and made it worthwhile for them to continue there (…); and since it was the trade in slaves and gold which had occasioned the expansion of Ashanti, and so brought this new nation down to the coast; it is clear that the early years of the nineteenth century mark the beginning of an entirely new era in the history of the Gold Coast.Footnote 4

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:

Fantee. (…) This is the most confused part of the Gold Coast as regards political existence; (…) In every small croom or village there is a king, although his territory does not extend beyond a mile round his capital; this is absurd in the extreme, but the habit exists, and will remain so, unless a radical change is made in the administrative department, or a powerful neighbouring chief, such as Ashantee, overruns the country and puts it down. [emphasis added]Footnote 25

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:

(…) by about 1850 (…) such places as Cape Coast, Elmina, Accra, and Anomabu (…) became more extensive as trade expanded and the number of educated Africans in positions of authority increased. In these towns traditional forms of government continued to exist, but they were being undermined by Western ideas and habits.Footnote 28

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:

It is possible, indeed, to view the whole of the nineteenth century in Gold Coast history as a period of transition (…) in which one particular European nation, Britain, achieved political dominion over an area very much more extensive than that involved in the earlier sphere of commercial contact [italics in original].Footnote 44

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.

Conclusion

Historians must rethink Fante history in a way that demonstrates processes of continuity between the age of the Atlantic creoles and that of the early nationalists by considering the ways in which cultural and political forms created during the era of the transatlantic slave trade were reinvented to meet the needs of Fante society in the nineteenth century. A useful model might be James Searing’s study of the Senegal River valley, in which he demonstrates that processes of social and political change in that diverse region can only be understood within a chronological framework that includes both the “Atlantic age” and the subsequent era of European proto-imperialism.Footnote 57 Whereas the Fante Confederation was obviously based on a conception of Fante identity that was oriented around a “modern” and “western” notion of nation-building, it must also be recognized as drawing significantly upon older, indigenous political-cultural traditions dating back to the eighteenth century or earlier.Footnote 58 Just as John Peel has argued that the modern notion of Yoruba identity should be seen as an aggregate “of longer-existing, lower-order communities,” and, “constructed from the materials provided by a pre-existent political culture,” so too should Fante identity, as articulated in the Fante Confederation, be examined in terms of its deep, local historical roots.Footnote 59 In the case of the Fante, the pre-existent political culture is one that combined multiple indigenous African elements and European ideas and practices from the seventeenth century, if not earlier. Rather than dismissing these multiple influences as corruptions undermining an imagined “pure” traditional African culture, historians must see them as part of a sort of creolization process, in which Fante culture itself has long been a mixture of geographically diverse elements.

Rebecca Shumway is currently an Affiliate Lecturer in the History Department at Georgetown University, Washington DC. She is the author of The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Rochester: Rochester University Press, 2011), which was a finalist for the 2012 Herskovitz Award. She has also published articles on Fante history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Email:

Footnotes

1 An early version of this paper was presented at the Crossroads in African Studies Conference, University of Birmingham, September 2013. I would like to thank the participants in that conference, as well as Patrick Manning, for helpful feedback on earlier drafts.

2 The onset of colonial rule in West Africa has been dated in various ways. The most active phase of colonization began after the Berlin Conference in 1885. Adu Boahen argues that, from an African perspective, the more important turning point was 1879–1880. A. Adu Boahen, African Perspectives on Colonialism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 29. It is also important to note that the histories of foreign settlement in Sierra Leone and Liberia begin in the late-eighteenth century.

3 The tendency to view the nineteenth century as a period characterized by European dominance has recently been described by T.C. McCaskie, who notes, “(…) it is all too easy – but profoundly misleading – to equate the achieved territorial substance of the British Empire in Africa with a hegemony in areas other than the geographical. The image conjured up by this misreading supposes a nineteenth-century retrospect in which an ascendant Britain stamped its cultural imprint ever more forcefully upon passive or otherwise cowed Africans.” Tom C. McCaskie, “Cultural Encounters: Britain and Africa in the Nineteenth Century,” in: Philip D. Morgan and Sean Hawkins (eds.), Black Experience and the Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 166–193.

4 John D. Fage, Ghana: A Historical Interpretation (Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959), 56.

5 The main works on southeastern Gold Coast include Emmanuel Akyeampong, Drink, Power and Cultural Change: A Social History of Alcohol in Ghana, c. 1800 to Recent Times (Portsmouth NH: Heinemann, 1996); Emmanuel Akyeampong, Between the Sea & the Lagoon: An Eco-Social History of the Anlo of Southeastern Ghana, c. 1850 to Recent Times (Athens OH: Ohio University Press, 2001); Sandra E. Greene, Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast: A History of the Anlo-Ewe (Portsmouth NH: Heinemann, 1996); Sandra E. Greene, Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter: A History of Meaning and Memory in Ghana (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 2002); John Parker, Making the Town: Ga State and Society in Early Colonial Accra (Portsmouth NH: Heinemann, 2000). Ray Kea’s monumental recent book includes some discussion of southern Ghana in the nineteenth century, as does Roger Gocking’s 1999 monograph. Ray A. Kea, A Cultural and Social History of Ghana from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century: The Gold Coast in the Age of Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade (Lewiston NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2012); Roger Gocking, Facing Two Ways: Ghana’s Coastal Communities under Colonial Rule (Lanham MD: University Press of America, 2000). On Asante, see: Tom C. McCaskie, State and Society in Pre-Colonial Asante (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Ivor Wilks, Asante in the Nineteenth Century: The Structure and Evolution of a Political Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

6 For a review of the historiography up to the 1980s, see: Ray Jenkins, “North American Scholarship and the Thaw in the Historiography of Ghanaian Coastal Communities,” Ghana Studies Bulletin 3 (1985), 19–28.

7 The main works are: W. Walton Claridge, A History of the Gold Coast and Ashanti (London: John Murray, 1915); William E.F. Ward, A History of Ghana (London: Praeger, 1958). The latter was originally published in 1948 under the title A History of the Gold Coast.

8 The best known are Joseph E. Casely Hayford, Gold Coast Native Institutions (London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1903); Carl Christian Reindorf, History of the Gold Coast and Asante (Accra: Ghana Universities Press, 1966); John Mensah Sarbah, Fanti Customary Laws (London: Frank Cass, 1968).

9 Edward Reynolds, Trade and Economic Change on the Gold Coast (London: Longman, 1974); Mary McCarthy, Social Change and the Growth of British Power in the Gold Coast: The Fante States, 1807–1874 (Lanham MD: University Press of America, 1983). Adu Boahen and Kwame Arhin have written important shorter works on this topic, as discussed below. James Sanders addresses nineteenth-century Fante history in a doctoral dissertation and an article: James R. Sanders, “The Political Development of the Fante in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: A Study of a West African Merchant Society,” PhD dissertation, Northwestern University (Evanston IL, 1980); James R. Sanders, “Palm Oil Production on the Gold Coast in the Aftermath of the Slave Trade: A Case Study of the Fante,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 15–1 (1982), 49–63. George Edgar Metcalfe published two important books dealing with the Gold Coast in this time period, but their focus is British colonial rule there, not African history per se: George E. Metcalfe, Great Britain and Ghana: Documents of Ghana History, 1807–1957 (Aldershot: Gregg Revivals, 1994); George E. Metcalfe, Maclean of the Gold Coast: the Life and Times of George Maclean, 1801–1847 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962).

10 The initial proclamation of British colonial rule over the coastal territories occurred in 1874, but Britain’s commitment to actual colonial occupation of sub-Saharan African territories wavered for another decade until the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 ushered in substantial intra-European competition.

11 These are described in Sarbah, Fanti Customary Laws, 12–15, 33–41, 57–64.

12 Notable works that highlight the Fante Confederation include Robert W. July, The Origins of Modern African Thought (New York: Praeger, 1967), 327–344; Henry S. Wilson, Origins of West African Nationalism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1969), 208–225; Francis Agbodeka, African Politics and British Policy in the Gold Coast, 1868–1900 (Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971); Francis Agbodeka, “The Fanti Confederacy, 1865–1869: An Enquiry into the Origins, Nature and Extent of an Early West African Protest Movement,” Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana 7 (1964), 82–123; Lennart Limberg, “The Economy of the Fanti Confederation,” The Historical Society of Ghana 11 (1971), 83–109; Lennart Limberg, “The Fanti Confederation, 1868–1872,” PhD dissertation, Göteborgs Universitet (Göteborg, 1974).

13 David Kimble, A Political History of Ghana: The Rise of Gold Coast Nationalism, 1850–1928 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 222–232; Limberg, “The Fanti Confederation,” 23; Metcalfe, Great Britain and Ghana, 305, 319.

14 A. Adu Boahen, “Politics in Ghana, 1800–1874,” in: Jacob F.A. Ajayi and Michael Crowder (eds.), History of West Africa, volume 2 (London: Longman, 1974), 243–244; Metcalfe, Great Britain and Ghana, 322.

15 Boahen argued that it was “a genuine and real nationalist movement whose origins go much further back than the 1860s.” Boahen, “Politics in Ghana,” 235, 242. Reynolds attributed the rise of the Confederation to “almost two decades of discontent and conflict with the local Government” – Reynolds, Trade and Economic Change, 167.

16 On the early development of Fante political institutions, see: Robin Law, “The Government of Fante in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of African History 54–1 (2013), 31–51.

17 These connections were first highlighted by Ghanaian historians in the 1960s. A. Adu Boahen, “Asante and Fante A.D. 1000–1800,” in: Jacob F.A. Ajayi and Ian Espie (eds.), A Thousand Years of West African History (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1965), 160–185; Kwame Y. Daaku, Trade and Politics on the Gold Coast, 1600–1720: A Study of the African Reaction to European Trade (London: Oxford University Press, 1970). More recent scholarship on the idea of an Atlantic community includes Robin Law and Kristin Mann, “West Africa in the Atlantic Community: The Case of the Slave Coast,” William and Mary Quarterly 56–2 (1999), 307–334. Ira Berlin locates some of the earliest “Atlantic creoles” – individuals familiar with the languages, cultures and commercial practices of Europe, Africa and the Americas – in Fanteland as early as the 1600s. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 18–24. As Robin Law notes: “If there was an ‘Atlantic community’, the African coastal towns which served as embarkation points for the trans-Atlantic slave trade were part of it, their commercial and ruling elites being involved in political, social and cultural networks, as well as purely business linkages, which spanned the ocean.” Robin Law, Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving ‘Port’, 1727–1892 (Athens OH: Ohio University Press, 2004), 4. Other illustrative works include Randy J. Sparks, The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Linda Heywood and John K. Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Kristin Mann, Slavery and the Birth of an African City: Lagos, 1760–1900 (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), especially 36, 51–52.

18 On the spread of the Fante language among coastal populations, see: Emmanuel N. Abaka, “On the Question of Standard Fante,” Journal of West African Languages 28–1 (1998/1999), 95–115; Florence Abena Dolphyne, “Akan Language Patterns and Development,” Tarikh 7–2 (1982), 35–45; Rebecca Shumway, The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Rochester: Rochester University Press, 2011), 15, 16, 152. The evolution of a regional Fante identity involved the expansion of the asafo militia system, the growing importance of the Nananom Mpow shrine at Mankessim, and greater collaboration among Fante political elites in the form of the Fante Coalition. See: Shumway, Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 15–17, 110–111, 132–153.

19 For example, Amonu Kuma used his position as paramount chief to assemble the subordinate chiefs and elders of Anomabo in order to settle disputes involving European traders and to formulate strategies for exploiting the rivalries among European nations. Shumway, Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 82–86; Randy J. Sparks, Where the Negroes are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 35–67. As far back as the seventeenth century, the so-called merchant princes of the Gold Coast similarly combined traditional political power with active participation in trans-Atlantic trade. Kwame Y. Daaku, “John Konny: The Last Prussian Negro Prince,” Tarikh 1–4 (1967), 55–64; Daaku, Trade and Politics, 28–29; David Henige, “John Kabes of Komenda: An Early African Entrepreneur and State Builder,” Journal of African History 18–1 (1977), 1–19.

20 Work on populations other than the Asante and Fante has developed slowly in recent years, but the history of northern Ghana in particular remains sorely neglected. Since the 1990s, especially, important research and discussion has also emerged around the history of southeastern Ghana (the Anlo and Ewe).

21 Duarte Pacheco Pereira, Esmeraldo De Situ Orbis (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1937).

22 Excerpts of many useful documents are reprinted in Elizabeth Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America (New York: Octagon Books, 1965). Some of the better known works include Paul E.H. Hair, Adam Jones and Robin Law (eds.), Barbot on Guinea: The Writings of Jean Barbot on West Africa 1678–1712 (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1992); Willem Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coasts of Guinea (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967), which should be read together with Albert van Dantzig, “Willem Bosman’s New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea: How Accurate Is It?,” History in Africa 1 (1974), 101–108; Pieter de Marees, Description and Historical Account of the Gold Kingdom of Guinea (translated by Albert van Dantzig and Adam Jones) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Wilhelm Johann Müller, Die afrikanische auf der guineischen Gold-Cust gelegene Landschafft Fetu (Graz: Verlaganstalt, 1968 [1676]) Selena Axelrod Winsnes (ed.), Letters on West Africa and the Slave Trade: Paul Erdmann Isert’s Journey to Guinea and the Carribean Islands in Columbia (1788) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

23 See especially: David Henige, The Chronology of Oral Tradition: Quest for a Chimera (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974); David Henige, “The Problem of Feedback in Oral Tradition: Four Examples from the Fante Coastlands,” Journal of African History 14–2 (1973), 223–235.

24 For a more thorough explanation of European sources and what they convey about pre-colonial African political and cultural institutions, see: Robin Law, The Slave Coast of West Africa, 1550–1750: The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on an African Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 4–11.

25 James Africanus Beale Horton, West African Countries and Peoples (London: W.J. Johnson, 1868), 118–119.

26 McCaskie, “Cultural Encounters,” 178.

27 Colonial Office of Great Britain, The Dominions Office and Colonial Office List…Comprising Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the Overseas Dominions and Colonial Dependencies of Great Britain (London: Watulow & Sons Limited, 1880), 76. For further discussion of the invention of this narrative, see: Rebecca Shumway, “Palavers and Treaty-Making in the British Acquisition of the Gold Coast Colony (West Africa),” in: Saliha Belmessous (ed.), Empire by Treaty: Negotiating European Expansion, 1600–1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 161–185.

28 Wolfson, Pageant of Ghana, 18.

29 Carola Lentz and Paul Nugent, “Ethnicity in Ghana: A Comparative Perspective,” in: Carola Lentz and Paul Nugent (eds.), Ethnicity in Ghana: The Limits of Invention (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 1–28, 7–8.

30 Fage, Ghana, 58; Boahen, “Politics in Ghana.”

31 Boahen, “Politics in Ghana.”

32 Kwame Arhin, “Rank and Class among the Asante and Fante in the Nineteenth Century,” Africa 53–1 (1983), 2–22.

33 A. Adu Boahen, “Arcany or Accany or Arcania and the Accanists of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries in European Records,” Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana 14–1 (1973), 105–111; A. Adu Boahen, “Fante Diplomacy in the Eighteenth Century,” Paper presented at the Proceedings of the Twentyfifth Symposium of the Colston Research Society, London, 1973; Daaku, “John Konny;” Kwame Y. Daaku, Trade and Politics on the Gold Coast, 1600–1720: A Study of the African Reaction to European Trade (London: Oxford University Press, 1970); John Kofi Fynn, Asante and its Neighbors (Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971); John Kofi Fynn, “Trade and Politics in Akanland,” Tarikh 7–2 (1982), 23–34.

34 Boahen, “Arcany;” Daaku, “John Konny;” Daaku, Trade and Politics; David Henige, “John Kabes of Komenda;” Margaret Priestley, West African Trade and Coast Society: A Family Study (London: Oxford University Press, 1969).

35 A recent attempt to address this gap is Shumway, Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

36 The groundbreaking work was Wilks’ Asante in the Nineteenth Century.

37 For a discussion of Asante historiography, see: McCaskie, State and Society, 1–23.

38 McCarthy, Social Change, 168, 170.

39 Examples from Arhin’s extensive publications include Kwame Arhin, “The Nature of Akan Government,” in: Pierluigi Valsecchi and Fabio Viti (eds.), Akan Worlds: Identity and Power in West Africa (Paris: l’Harmattan, 1999), 69–80; Kwame Arhin, Traditional Rule in Ghana: Past and Present (Accra: Sedco, 1985).

40 Kea, A Cultural and Social History of Ghana. Kea’s study is concerned with questions of power and agency in southern Ghana more broadly, from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. The distinctions between ethnolinguistic groups such as Fante, Asante, Ga, Ewe are not central to the study.

41 Parker, Making the Town, xxiv.

42 Bayo Holsey, Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), especially 105–109.

43 Akosua Perbi is an important exception: Akosua Adoma Perbi, A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana: From the 15th to the 19th Centuries (Accra: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2004). An important new graphic history also examines slavery in the Gold Coast: Trevor R. Getz and Liz Clarke, Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Most of the scholarship on Ghana’s role in the slave trade has been written by historians of the African Diaspora. For example, see: Saidiya V. Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007); Kwasi Konadu, The Akan Diaspora in the Americas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Simon P. Newman, A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

44 Fage, Ghana: A Historical Interpretation, 58.

45 On Africans in the Atlantic Community, see: George E. Brooks, Eurafricans in Western Africa: Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Athens OH: Ohio University Press, 2003); Kea, A Cultural and Social History of Ghana; Law and Mann. “West Africa in the Atlantic Community;” Newman, A New World of Labor; John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

46 Patrick Manning’s work is particularly useful for understanding changes within Africa. Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Thornton’s Africa and Africans emphasizes the links between changes taking place in Africa and in the Americas.

47 Recent works on the African Diaspora include Patrick Manning, The African Diaspora: A History through Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Michael Gomez, Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). On the Black Atlantic, see: Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

48 By contrast, another recent work claims that the Atlantic World continues into the twenty-first century: Toyin Falola and Kevin D. Roberts (eds.), The Atlantic World, 1450–2000 (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 2008).

49 The latter is typified by Thomas Benjamin, The Atlantic World: Europeans, Africans, Indians and Their Shared History, 1400–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

50 See, for example: David P. Geggus (ed.), The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2001); Jane Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Landers considers the histories of Atlantic creoles as a way of understanding “the active participation of Africans and their descendants in the age of Atlantic revolutions” (c. 1760–1850) (page 4), but focuses exclusively on the southern United States and the Caribbean.

51 The concept of an economic crisis associated with abolition of the slave trade was first articulated by Dike and elaborated by Hopkins. K. Onwuka Dike, Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, 1830–1885: An Introduction to the Economic and Political History of Nigeria (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1956); Anthony G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa (London: Longman, 1973). On the expansion of slavery, see: Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Manning, Slavery and African Life.

52 Berlin refers to Atlantic creoles as sharing experience from “three worlds” that came together on the Atlantic littoral. Ira Berlin, “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America,” William and Mary Quarterly 53–2 (1996), 251–288.

53 Long before the emergence of Atlantic history, Jacob Ajayi recognized the importance of these dimensions of early nationalist ideas in West Africa. Jacob F.A. Ajayi, “Nineteenth Century Origins of Nigerian Nationalism,” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 2–2 (1961), 196–210.

54 See, for example: Adrian Hastings, The Church in Africa: 1450–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 341–342.

55 Christopher Fyfe, Africanus Horton, 1835–1883: West African Scientist and Patriot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972).

56 Richard J.M. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 4.

57 James F. Searing, West African Slavery and Atlantic Commerce: The Senegal River Valley, 1700–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

58 For evidence of seventeenth-century origins of Fante political culture, see: Law, “The Government of Fante.”

59 John D.Y. Peel, Ijeshas and Nigerians: The Incorporation of a Yoruba Kingdom 1890s–1970s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 263.

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