with his merchandise to a village inland where he would purchase kola.39 Once there, further rounds of feasting, gift giving, and socializing undoubtedly took place.
A rather less enthusiastic description comes from the French Huguenot (Calvinist) Jean Barbot, who wrote of his two brief voyages to the Guinea Coast in 1678–79 and 1681–82. His account of his time ashore in Senegal drew on conversations he had with employees of the French Compagnie du Sénégal and included a listing of the numerous dues and tolls that agents of the company had to pay when trading inland. These charges, which he attributed to the “black kings,” were a determining factor, in his view, of how profitable the trade would be. He or his informants estimated them to be about ten percent of the total value of the trade and specified that they were paid in goods. He also listed other payments to individuals such as local officials and suppliers of wood and water. Still other gifts or payments were due to individuals in each town or village. In the example he gave of the village of Camalingue, there were gifts to minor officials, to the king’s wife, to the valet and son of the town’s governor, to the chief interpreter and his valet, and to others. These charges, while individually small, added up to a significant amount and were considered by Barbot to be too time consuming and troublesome to dispense.40
But even Barbot could warm to local kings on the Guinea Coast who, according to his judgment, behaved with good manners and propriety. Such was his impression of the elderly king of Sestos on the “Pepper Coast” (well to the south, in modern Liberia), where he visited for over a week during his second voyage.41 He provides a detailed description of his meeting and exchange of gifts with the king, an event that took place in a special circular building where Sestos officials met to discuss and settle trade agreements with foreign merchants and other strangers (see fig. 1.3). Among its interior furnishings was a small shrine where ritual offerings were made and where oaths were declared and witnessed. Barbot’s illustration of the meeting shows the king and his senior courtiers, all dressed in embroidered and flowing white cotton robes and seated on patterned mats. Barbot was careful to note the “grisgris,” or charms, gracing the king’s elaborate cap and necklaces. After a formal welcoming of the visitors came a ceremonial exchange of gifts. Barbot’s gift consisted of two long bars of “voyage iron,” a selection of glass beads, several iron knives, and two flasks of brandy. The king offered his guests provisions—two hens and a container of clean (hulled) rice—which Barbot’s men immediately prepared for the assembled to share.
FIGURE 1.3 King of Sestos receives Jean Barbot. John Barbot, “A Description of the Coasts of North and South-Guinea,” in A. and J. Churchill, A Collection of Voyages and Travels (London, 1732). Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
What Barbot was seeking from the king was not only an arrangement to buy ivory but also permission to cut wood and to replenish their water supplies. At the conclusion of their meeting, the king’s interpreter informed Barbot that he could expect a visit from the king very shortly. Over the course of his stay, Barbot managed to purchase a small amount of ivory along with stores of rice and about two hundred chickens. And his men, in addition to provisioning the ship with wood and water, took advantage of the fine fishing the river had to offer. Lacking Coelho’s extensive and decades-long experience on the Guinea Coast and perhaps revealing something of his own puritanical values, Barbot characterized Sestos in idyllic terms as a community that lived in peace, quiet, and modest abundance.42 A more experienced observer, however, would have been more circumspect. Considering the advanced age of the king, itself a portent of the approaching end to his reign, that peaceful time was likely to be soon interrupted by an unpredictable and possibly fractious interregnum period and in its wake any number of disruptive arguments or conflicts.
This chapter’s general overview reveals West Africa up to the eve of the Atlantic era as having been far from socially homogeneous or economically unified. West Africa was instead a land characterized by great social variety and dramatic differences in local economies and subsistence production. A long-standing history of trade with the equally foreign wider Islamic world had left its mark in a host of commercial institutions, relations, and practices that Africans adapted and Europeans accepted in the subsequent era of Euro-African maritime trade. Islam and the Arabic language bequeathed a core commonality of values and trust among Muslim merchants, enabling their commercial networks and markets to reach into many locales beyond the Islamic sphere. West Africa’s interlocking zones of trade, communication, and currency circulation cut across her many geographical, ecological, social, linguistic, and religious divides, thus forming a richly complex yet demonstrably viable commercial setting in which Europeans and Africans could develop their Guinea trade.
Europeans engaging in early modern trade on the Upper Guinea Coast had to navigate this complexity and adapt to a wide range of localized trading practices, markets, and values. They traded their goods in assortments that African traders wanted, and the process of coming to agreement on them was riddled with potential disagreements over specific matters of taste, quality, value, and price, all of which might change unpredictably over time and from place to place. Hence the social aspects of commerce—protocols, courtesies, favors, and gifts—carried great weight. To keep the flows of goods and currencies moving, European visitors had to show the proper deference and respect for their various West African trading partners and do so consistently and in the right ways. Merchants from Europe who wished to be successful learned that they had to prove themselves to be both well-informed and well-behaved—and therefore trustworthy—in Africans’ terms.
CHAPTER TWO
“Artificers” and Merchants
Making and Moving Goods
MISSING FROM historical maps showing trade routes and networks of the past are the complex and crucially important human dimensions of commerce. Much of what went into trade was essential work, though unnoticed and therefore unrecorded, for it was labor folded into the daily and seasonal routines of people’s lives. Countless numbers and varieties of people—compatriots and foreigners in towns and countryside and on rivers and seas—became intricately interconnected through increasingly distant exchanges of what they made, often without their even knowing. In this respect, the early modern Atlantic trading system in Africa was no different from any other. Many disparate people played a role in creating it, and it took a far-flung host of other individuals with the complementing knowledge, skills, labor, and experiences to keep the circuits replenished. Merchants, often considered to be the primary actors in commerce, spent their lives and careers developing, revising, and exercising valuable intelligence about these makers of the goods they moved—the news and knowledge that enabled them to connect manufacturers with far-off markets of consumers.
These groups they connected—consumers as well as manufacturers—are equally important actors in commerce, although they can all too easily be overlooked. This chapter focuses on both groups, especially the producers of trade goods, in order to place Euro-African trade on the Upper Guinea Coast into the wider intercontinental contexts of the people who created and maintained it. They represent a wide range of ongoing human investments in training and skills that powered the preindustrial toolkits and labor-intensive workshops of artisans or “artificers.” Workers of all kinds—men, women, children, unskilled, semiskilled, skilled, free, and unfree—generated and processed raw materials and turned them into semifinished goods, transportable commodities, or finished products of one kind or another. Tracking the supply chains that Atlantic trade commodities followed thus provides a more complete view of the geographical scale and social complexity of early modern commerce on the Guinea Coast. And taking into account the varied ways artificers’ work was organized, how their working conditions changed over time, and how well or how poorly workers profited is a necessary part of the story.
European
