more favorable wind patterns they had found farther out into the Atlantic. This breakthrough opened up the Guinea Coast for the first time to European exploration and Euro-African Atlantic commerce.
Direct trade with Europe started out as comparable to Africa’s ancient external trading networks along her Mediterranean, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean shores, by which goods such as gold, ivory, animal skins, rhinoceros horn, ostrich eggs and feathers, and captives were exported in exchange for precious stones such as agate and rock-crystal, beads made of coral or shell, plain and patterned textiles, and a variety of containers large and small, made of ceramic, glass, or copper alloy. What set the Euro-African Guinea trade apart from these earlier ones was its later timing and much greater intercontinental scale and—above all—the regularity and volume of the trade in captives, which grew enormously during the years described in this book and even more so during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The intensity of the trade in slaves between Africa and the Americas was a totally new, dramatically different, and tragic episode in world history. Ships were loaded and sent off across the Atlantic with cargoes made up entirely of hundreds of imprisoned and suffering human beings.
Looking back on the late seventeenth-century north Atlantic, one might see it simply as a time of gradual transition, as merely a backdrop to revolutionary events that came in the mid-eighteenth to nineteenth centuries.19 For those people who experienced it, however, with no knowledge of where their strategies and decisions might take them, it must have seemed a particularly volatile and uncertain time, demanding much experimentation with very high risks. This comes across repeatedly in the RAC records as they show how important the nonslave African exports were to the company and how its officials in London entertained enthusiastic but ultimately unrealistic wishes to establish plantations of tropical products on the Guinea Coast.20 Viewed especially from the vantage point of northern Guinea, and considering its convenient location relative to Europe, the transatlantic slave trade can be seen in its full global context as an important part of what was actually a much more complex and expansive economic picture. And it is this larger, multilateral global network, which linked the Guinea Coast directly with Europe as well as to the Americas, that I refer to generally as the Guinea trade. West Africa performed multiple roles in early modern Atlantic trade—as a supplier of slaves to the Americas, as a supplier of some slaves along with gold, ivory, dyewood, and other raw or processed materials to Europe, and as a market for European exports and reexports from Asia.21
There are two interrelated parts to this book. One part is global in scale, laying out the West African setting and the origin and production of Afro-Eurasian commodities that were traded. The other part shifts to a human scale—a social history of human activity and personal relations—focusing on individual people who were involved in RAC trading operations on the Upper Guinea Coast. Chapter 1 takes the reader through an overview of West Africa prior to the era of Atlantic trade, showing how centuries of Islamic commerce across the Sahara had shaped and reshaped its regional and interregional markets and trading networks. This was the social, economic, cultural, and material environment to which European merchants had to adapt. The overview continues in chapter 2 and expands the geographical scale to include the production and producers of the major global commodities—European, Asian, and African—that were central to the Guinea trade. Early modern Euro-African trade was built with the skills and labor of countless people worldwide.
The core of the book—chapters 3, 4, and 5—is a social history of RAC traders, support staff, suppliers, and captives in northern Guinea during the company’s well-documented monopoly period. The chapters represent three main categories of people who were active participants in the trade, willingly or unwillingly. Chapter 3 tracks the careers of free Africans and Euro-Africans who supplied export goods, provisions, and services to the RAC. Chapter 4 shifts to the experiences, fates, and fortunes of people in successive stages of captivity or enslavement and instances when they actively refused unfree status. And chapter 5 surveys the surprisingly varied employees of the RAC on salary, some of whom were hired from nearby African communities. Taken together, these people’s intertwined lives and careers present the reader with a vivid and memorable picture of the African side of early modern Atlantic trade, showing what it could mean to its participants—European, African, and Euro-African—and how those in this particular corner of the world carried it out.
In the writing of this book I have followed several guiding principles. One is that I hope to reach a wide audience, and to that end I aim for language that is clear and accessible. African history, especially precolonial African history, is not widely taught and may seem so distant and unfamiliar to readers that it comes across as an unappealing, intimidating, or even impenetrable topic. My years of teaching African history have shown me that describing the experiences of individual people in Africa’s past offers to the uninitiated an effective and welcoming entryway. Readers may wonder about how and on what basis I selected the named individual people whose stories I tell in my chapters of social history. They are mainly a self-selected sample of people who chose to work for or with the company for a sufficiently significant amount of time such that they repeatedly entered the company’s documentation, thereby giving me the opportunity to track their careers. I could have included more Luso-African individuals in the group, but I was aiming also to present a cross-section of people, showing complexities and variations in their identities. For each of them I gathered many fragmentary pieces of their lives and kept them in files until I began to write, and it was only then that I could fully see and appreciate both the individuality of people in the sample and the remarkable and sometimes surprising things they did over time.
Finally, my writing reflects my commitment to teaching historical thinking—showing students where history comes from and how historians examine, wonder about, grapple with, and interpret their primary sources.22 I often refer directly to the evidence, the particular sources, what they may or may not mean, what they may indicate, and also what seems to be missing. These historical actors who turned up in my archival sources have intrigued and humbled me again and again, and in gratitude for the richly rewarding opportunity to do this work I aim to understand and respect their lives, not to judge them.
CHAPTER ONE
Buyers and Sellers in Cross-Cultural Trade
LONG BEFORE the beginning of Atlantic commerce, camel caravans linked tropical West Africa to the Mediterranean basin and western Asia through a complex system of interlocking trans-Saharan trading networks.1 Referred to by early Muslim geographers as Bilad al-Sudan, The Lands of the Black People, West Africa became famous in Islamic communities after Mansa Musa, leader of the Mali Empire, which was the principal supplier of gold to the Mediterranean world, dispensed lavish gifts of gold in Cairo as he passed through on his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324. Mali’s renown spread even farther, into the courts of Christian medieval Europe, via the Catalan Atlas, a richly illustrated map drawn between 1375 and 1380 and given as a gift from the king of Aragon to Charles V. It depicts the “known world” at that time with Europe, the Near East, Asia, and North Africa shown in relation to one another and interconnected by travel and trade, including sub-Saharan African kingdoms and their major entrepôts such as Gao and Timbuktu. The visual imagery on the map ranges widely from detailed renderings of architecture and geographical features to local varieties of flora and fauna and items of commercial interest. Among the individual figures depicted is a profile of Mali’s leader, shown seated on a throne, adorned with European-style crown and scepter and holding up a large nugget of gold as a sign of his empire’s storied wealth.
