and Asian Makers of Western Africans’ Imports
The general classes of overseas commodities that England’s Royal African Company (RAC) brought to the Guinea Coast in the second half of the seventeenth century centered on textiles and metalwares. These remained the two most important categories of trade goods into and throughout the eighteenth century.1 Looking more closely at the most important major products in each category sharpens the picture. By identifying them and tracking where and by whom they were made, it becomes possible to better understand both the full extent of Anglo-Atlantic trading networks in this early period and the reasons behind their reach. For in striking contrast with the eighteenth century, England did not herself produce many of the goods the RAC shipped to the Guinea Coast. Following on the Dutch example, whose supremacy in seventeenth-century commerce depended heavily on reexporting products that others made, the company instead tapped into established supply centers in the Baltic region and in South Asia to build the range of goods they had on offer. The opening of Atlantic trade had brought European mariners into direct contact with the tropics—tropical climates and seasonal patterns, tropical products such as cotton and dyewoods, and communities of people who lived and worked there. Thus, in this early period England relied on producers and suppliers in locations spread widely across the temperate and tropical zones of Afro-Eurasia (see map 2.1). Only very gradually and aided by their customers in Africa and the deliberate management of their Court of Assistants and Committee of Goods, the RAC was able to encourage and support English manufacturers (some of whom were shareholders in the company) in producing some of these reexport goods at home. And in doing so the RAC contributed in part to launching Britain’s later and well-known successes in manufacturing in the eighteenth century.2
MAP 2.1 Major Afro-Eurasian exports in Anglo-African North Atlantic trade, seventeenth c. Map by Brian Edward Balsley, GISP.
Someone reading today the loading lists and invoices of RAC cargoes would find the export trade to the Guinea Coast utterly incomprehensible. Products were known by a seemingly endless number of particular and sometimes peculiar names with strange and varying phonetic spellings that have long since lost whatever familiar meanings they once had. But setting aside these obscure names and focusing instead on precisely what the goods were like makes it possible to see a relatively coherent pattern of what the RAC had learned about which goods they needed to trade successfully on the Guinea Coast and from whom they could get them. An example is cotton textiles from India, which West African merchants and consumers consistently favored for purchase alongside the lower-priced cotton textiles made in West Africa. Among their different weaves and patterns, the most important were known as allejaes, baftes, brawles, Guinea stuffs, long cloths, longees, nicconees, pautkes, and tapseels.3 If taken at face value, the specificity of these names might suggest that each of these textiles was markedly different from the others. That was not at all the case. These nine Indian textiles can be broken down into just two main types of cotton cloths produced in three distinct regions of the subcontinent. Long cloths were, as the name suggests, long lengths of plain white cotton, while allejaes were loom-patterned cottons, that is, with woven stripes or checks. Both were made on South Asia’s east coast in Bengal and on the Coromandel (southeast) Coast. Baftes and pautkes were also plain white cottons (or sometimes dyed a solid color), whereas nicconees, tapseels, brawles, and Guinea stuffs were loom-patterned cottons, all produced in Gujarat (now northwest India) (see map 2.1).
The human dimension of these Atlantic trade textiles extended deep into the hinterlands of ports where more and more people came to experience the stimulus of this expanding market. Individual merchants and textile wholesalers who supplied export cottons to England’s East India Company agents in Madras (Coromandel Coast) and Surat (Gujarat) were among the most obvious beneficiaries of this trade as long as prices were in their favor and weavers worked productively at their looms. The latter, who were male and usually worked as full-time professionals, were not rich by any means, but they were able to earn modest and relatively secure incomes by negotiating cash advances directly from local merchants to buy cotton fiber or thread and other supplies. In return they would agree to produce a specified quantity of one or another type of cotton textile. And as long as the prices they paid for raw cotton were not too high, these weavers might do reasonably well. Independent suppliers in the rural areas of Gujarat, Bengal, and south India could also profit from Atlantic trade, albeit in smaller ways. Men in agrarian households grew their own cotton, and their wives and daughters cleaned it, spun it into thread, and sometimes prepared the warps, or lengthwise threads, that weavers dressed onto their looms to make the cloth. Cleaning and spinning cotton was extremely labor-intensive, which meant that cotton manufacture relied on an enormous number of spinners. Estimates are that women accounted for more than half of the labor force in the production of Indian export cottons.4 Modest cash payments for all of these essential preparatory tasks must have made noticeable differences in income for small farmers and their families in towns and in the countryside.
Another major textile product that the RAC sold in Upper Guinea was a linen known by them as sletias, after Silesia, the central European region of the Habsburg Empire where these cloths were made (see map 2.1).5 Linen manufacture for export to world markets had been organized in rural areas there since the sixteenth century. But in this case, and in contrast to Indian cotton manufacturers, the producers hardly benefitted at all from their basic contributions to this labor-intensive process. Production of linen cloth began with the families harvesting home-grown flax, a fibrous grass that they then steeped, crushed, beat, and brushed to break down the stalks and soften the fiber for spinning.6 Both men and women worked at preparing flax fibers and spinning them into thread, but the bleaching of thread was done by women of the household.
Deprivations these workers experienced under increasing pressures to produce more linens for export were dramatically more onerous than the experiences of their counterparts who produced cotton textiles in India. Silesian workers were serfs and peasants under the control of their feudal landlords and bound by a set of harshly extractive obligations and taxes. Male weavers, for example, had to pay fees to their lord just to be able to continue working at their trade, and they owed other fees for their marriages, for having children, and even for death. It was the lords, not the weavers, who entered into direct commercial agreements with English and Dutch merchants, and it was they who set the conditions of production. Yet despite the servile status and low incomes of workers, the volume of Silesian linen output and sales rose steadily over the seventeenth century. Workers resisted these miserable and worsening conditions by refusing to meet their obligations. At times, they even resorted to violent uprisings. One such instance in the late seventeenth century had to be put down by military force. Meanwhile, landlords were able to keep up production by settling even more desperate landless immigrant spinners and weavers onto their estates. However, the severe constraints of this feudal arrangement led to a contraction and stagnation of Silesian linen manufacture in the eighteenth century—at the time when British textile manufacture was embarking on fundamental technological changes.7
Of the RAC exports to Africa that were made domestically in England, woolen textiles were the most steady and significant. Broadcloth, a mainstay of English weaving, was inappropriate for far-off tropical markets because it was too heavy and too high in price. Lighter, cheaper woolens, however, served better in the Guinea trade, among them the simple plain weave textiles known as Welsh plains and bays, which the company bought in modest quantities on advance contracts (see figure 2.1). It was, above all, the development of a product line called “new draperies,” copying a major export of the Low Countries already in the sixteenth century, that allowed English woolens to become a successful commodity in warmer climates, including on the West African coast.
