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 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