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. Facing him is an approaching merchant mounted on a camel, dressed in the characteristic turban and veil of Saharan Berbers. The map conveys the message that he is one of our allies—a generous and trustworthy trading partner and a major source of gold for the coinage system of Eurasian trade. Henceforth West Africa in the minds of Europeans became legendary as a “Land of Gold.” And it was the hope of securing direct access to sub-Saharan African gold, as well as to the spice and silk trade of Asia, that propelled Portuguese mariners to explore Africa’s western coastline in the fifteenth century, thus opening up the Guinea trade and a new Atlantic era in world history.2
This chapter lays out the trading networks and protocols Europeans encountered on the Upper Guinea Coast as direct Euro-African maritime commerce developed. The major regional and interregional commodity currencies of West Africa, originally tied to trans-Saharan trade, would be deployed in new directions and along new axes while Europeans added greater supplies of them, thus reshaping the structure and intensifying the dynamics of commercial operations between the coast and interior regions. At the same time, the business of trading and how it was carried out tended to follow well-established patterns and arrangements that had existed for hundreds of years. Added to familiar ways of calculating measures and values came new ones from the Atlantic. With the arrival of Europeans—first the Portuguese in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, then the Dutch, English, and French in the 1600s—this new Euro-African commercial zone expanded on local African practices while at the same time creating new networks and patterns of trade.
Money: Commodity Currencies
Much of the system that Portuguese caravels skirting Africa’s north Atlantic coastline in the fifteenth century were entering was in the hands of specialist Muslim merchant groups known generally as Juula. Based mainly in regions along the southern shore of the Sahara, Juula merchants created extensive trade diasporas that linked major trans-Saharan routes with myriad local, regional, and interregional networks to the south.3 Evidence from archaeological sites and from Arabic written sources provides a general indication of just how extensive these networks were, reaching overland and along rivers to connect towns and cities in the grasslands and forests there with the primary entrepôts of Saharan caravan traffic. Prominent among the surviving material remains of this commercial system are foreign manufactures that crossed the desert and found their way as far as the tropical rainforests, well before the arrival of the Portuguese. For example, two archaeological sites at Igbo-Ukwu (in modern southeast Nigeria) are especially significant on this score. Among the priestly burial, regalia, and treasure unearthed at those sites is a spectacular trove of over 165,000 trade beads from the Mediterranean and Asia. Dating to the ninth or tenth century, the sites provide us with general temporal markers