Despite its significance in Atlantic Africa and in the making of the Atlantic World, large historiographic gaps still exist in the study of the Gold Coast. Indeed, the precolonial history of the central region of the Gold Coast and of its populations has been largely ignored by historians. It is within this historiographic void that Rebecca Shumway's work offers a number of significant interventions. This solidly-researched and comprehensive study of state and coalition formation, ethnogenesis, and transatlantic trade in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Gold Coast will be an essential starting point for future inquiries in the field.

This book tracks the political and cultural development of coastal peoples in the Gold Coast from the seventeenth century through the long eighteenth century. The Borbor Fante – ancestors of modern Fante peoples in southern Ghana – made a radical transformation from small, autonomous, and warring polities to what Shumway terms a ‘Coastal Coalition’. As a multi-state alliance, this coalition of Fante-speaking polities was formed both for mutual defense against the expansionist Asante kingdom and to capitalize on common trade opportunities with Europeans along the coast. The processes by which this coalition developed and the related ethnogenesis of Fante peoples – marked by a new common tongue, reverence for a powerful war shrine, and the formation of commoner militias in coastal states – forms part of a complex political and cultural geography that places coastal peoples at the center of Shumway's analyses. The value of this work is in moving away from the Asante-centric emphasis of so many studies of Gold Coast history. By disaggregating Fante state formation and culture from a monolithic and homogeneous ‘Akan’ milieu, Shumway demonstrates the unique circumstances and reactions to changing historical tides of the coastal peoples of the southern Gold Coast. She rightfully elevates places like Anomabo and Mankessim – critical commercial, political, and cultural sites in the central region of the Gold Coast – to levels of historical importance rivaling Elmina and Cape Coast.

Both the principal strength and the weakness of Shumway's study rest with her effort to complicate the idea of a common Akan-speaking ethno-linguistic heritage of the coastal populations of the Gold Coast. She crafts interesting, even brilliant, analyses of how the slave trade shaped both state formation and ethnogenesis of Fante peoples. Two icons of Fante culture – the war shrine of Nananom Mpow and the asafo militia system – originated as reactions to the destabilizing influences of the slave trade and the ever present threat of Asante invasion. Both provided Fante peoples with a sense of protection. The use of Fante as a regional lingua franca and even the existence of the Coastal Coalition – a unique political configuration among Akan-speakers in the Gold Coast – were responses to the same sense of threat (and commercial opportunities). To this end, Shumway convincingly discusses the ‘double descent’ system of inheritance or agnatic descent patterns among Fante peoples as a result of the ‘integrative role’ of asafo companies and, ultimately, as a unique Fante response to circumstances generated during the slave trade era (p. 151). In this way, she successfully carves out a space for Fante peoples and demonstrates the impossibility of lumping them in with a homogenous ‘Akan’ culture assumed and imagined by a wide range of scholars.

Nevertheless the sweeping nature of some of her historiographic assessments – particularly Shumway's assessment of recent trends in African diasporic historical studies, falls a bit short. In targeting the field of African diaspora history as responsible for projecting a sense of Akan homogeneity, she seems to be misreading the works of Stephanie Smallwood, Robin Law, and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall among others. Even if these scholars can be charged with relying upon an existing historiography of precolonial Ghana that embraces notions of Akan homogeneity, their actual interpretations are far more nuanced and sophisticated than Shumway allows. Indeed, of the books published in the past decade, only Kwasi Konadu's The Akan Diaspora in the Americas (2010) is guilty of developing an uncomplicated vision of a homogeneous ‘Akan’ cultural heritage in the Gold Coast – one that, he argues, survived virtually intact in the Western Hemisphere for centuries.

Among the contributions offered by Shumway is her analysis of Anomabo – a place, according to a British governor of settlements in the Gold Coast, ‘where the Negroes are Masters’ (p. 1). Unlike the slave trade conducted through Cape Coast and Elmina, which were controlled by European trading companies, the physical and political terrain at Anomabo meant that the Borbor Fante and, later, the Coastal Coalition had a direct role in what Shumway styles a central ‘hub’ of the slave trade. Indeed, the volume of trade at Anomabo outstripped that of both Cape Coast and Elmina and the town's elite demonstrated their agency in and mastery over the slave trade conducted at their coast.

For some, the role of the Anomabo elite in the full spectrum of historical agency will not come as a surprise and Shumway may linger on this a beat too long as she seems to be responding to a dated historiographic current that focused on Atlantic Africans as victims or passive objects in the processes occurring around them. For most readers, the elevation of Anomabo and the centrality of Fante peoples in commercial, political, and cultural affairs in Shumway's narrative will serve as a refreshing counterbalance to the Asante-centricism and notions of ‘Akan’ homogeneity in the study of the Gold Coast and its diaspora.