with a trade mark and weigh in at seventy-five to eighty bars per ton, or twenty-eight to thirty pounds per bar. Between 1673 and 1704, the RAC reexported well over five thousand tons of Swedish bar iron (around four hundred thousand bars) to the Guinea Coast.11
Sweden had only recently shifted production of iron toward the export trade. Previously, between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries, iron ore had been mined and smelted into iron metal in communally held blast furnaces and then processed yet further into units of workable iron for local and regional users. Agrarian households living in the ore resource areas carried out this work seasonally and on a relatively small scale. In the early seventeenth century, however, larger-scale specialized ironworks began to be set up by individuals who acted on new economic policies that were put into place by the Swedish Crown. Outside the areas of ore deposits, merchants and noblemen set about establishing privately owned estates designed to combine agricultural production with the production of bar iron for export. These new ironworking estates generated more refined and standardized iron in greater quantities than ever before. And as iron exports rose steadily during the seventeenth century, the Crown also set up a Board of Mines to monitor and regulate them.12
Although some independent peasant ironworkers continued to produce bar iron on a small scale, a majority of agrarian households produced iron for export and found themselves working under a much more rigid and restrictive division of labor. Crown regulations divided the stages of mining, smelting, and forging more sharply from one another by geography and by workforce. This scheme restricted peasant ironworkers to just the primary stages of mining and smelting the ore. Secondary manufacture, that is, refining smelted iron and forging it into bars, was far more profitable. Under the new regulations, it was carried out separately in workshops on the private estates. These were strategically located in provinces adjacent to where the ore deposits were and where the mining and smelting went on. Some of the larger estates also began to operate their forges year round.
In this new arrangement, the peasant workers came under much closer scrutiny and direct control. Royal decrees restricted access to iron ore only to those farmers who were engaged in pig-iron production for the estates, and each mining district was put on a work schedule. Labor in mining—the extracting of ore from the pit mines, sorting it and loading it into horse-drawn carts, and transporting it to the blast furnace—was shared by the farmer’s household. So, too, was the work of making the charcoal fuel used in smelting the ore. But since most of this work, including the actual smelting process, was carried out in winter, peasant households could potentially realize noticeable economic benefits in the form of either subsistence or cash by entering into contracts to supply the ironworks estates with pig iron. Over time, however, as ironmasters running the estates sought to increase production and lower costs, peasant workers came under harsher conditions and constraints. More of them found that the terms of their contracts that laid out the amount and price of the pig iron they were to produce ended up leaving them bound to an ironmaster by debt. And if they were able instead to contract with merchants who sold pig iron to the estates, indebtedness would more often be the result in that case as well. Thus, for most Swedish ironworkers, intensification of iron production for Atlantic trade was clearly not a boon, and so those who could do so retaliated by embezzling raw materials or working on their own accounts.13
Second in significance among RAC exports of metalwares was a wide variety of drinking vessels, plates, and containers made of copper, brass, or pewter. Copper- and brasswares of English manufacture were not exported at this time, and so, as with iron bars, the company relied on reexports from elsewhere, in this case mainly northern Germany via the Baltic trade (see map 2.1). Cast copper bars, an intermediate good, were one important category of these wares, as were finished copper basins that the company acquired from suppliers in Amsterdam. Containers made of brass required several stages of manufacture, beginning with the alloying of the metal, then the pressing of it into sheets, next the skilled battery work of hammering the sheets out over specially designed anvils and molds, and finally turning out the finished trade good (see figure 2.2). The RAC brasswares were mainly basins, pans, and kettles made in a variety of shapes and sizes especially for the Guinea trade and known by particular names such as tackings, neptunes, diglings, wire-bound kettles, and driven kettles. Pewter, an alloy of tin, had been made in England since the eleventh century, and by the mid-fourteenth century pewter craftsmen had formed a guild in London. They, too, hammered out their pewter sheets into a variety of wares such as basins, jugs, plates, tankards, and porringers. It is unclear how much of England’s domestic pewter actually contributed to the Guinea trade, as there were ongoing problems with foreign competitors who sold at much lower prices but did so by cutting back the alloy’s tin content. Another problem faced by English pewterers was a custom fee that was added to discourage exports. It is therefore likely that the RAC at this time had to rely on reexports of pewter as well.14 All of these metal goods were significant in the seventeenth-century RAC trade on the Upper Guinea Coast, where local people put them to many uses ranging from important social and ceremonial presentations to the productive work of processing beeswax and intensifying the making of sea salt.
FIGURE 2.2 A coppersmith at work. Image after Jost Amman, 1568, H. Hamilton, The English Brass and Copper Industries to 1800 (London, 1926).
Firearms were a third significant component of RAC exports of metalwares, supplied in the early years of their trade mostly by the Dutch. English guns were difficult to sell as exports, and even when London gunsmiths produced copies of the popular Dutch models, their asking price was not competitive. Undeterred, they petitioned against the company for importing cheap trade guns and in 1685 succeeded in getting the practice prohibited by an act of Parliament. The RAC managed to avoid the prohibition by sending ships to Amsterdam, where they were laden with guns and powder and then sent directly on to the Guinea Coast. But in just over a decade a variety of firearms, including muskets, were being produced for the export trade in England—due in large part to Europe’s wars in the 1690s and early 1700s, which brought expansions in arms production. Between 1701 and 1704, the RAC was able to send over thirty-two thousand muskets, carbines, pistols, fowling pieces, and fusees (light muskets) to the Guinea Coast, many of them purchased on contract.15
Trade guns, however, as well as gunpowder, were notoriously inconsistent in quality, and buyers on the Guinea Coast were quick to notice. They deemed guns and powder offered by Dutch and Danish traders to be the best. Moreover, the parts of firearms that were made of iron, even those that were polished steel, corroded quickly in the high humidity of the tropics. Thus, buyers came to prefer special mountings made of brass.16 It was therefore not uncommon for RAC factors at the trading forts to find themselves with old or damaged firearms on hand and in some cases choosing to send them back to the company in London. Attempts to have repairs done were not entirely successful. In one instance in 1704 the company asked a group of ten London gunsmiths to evaluate the condition of five hundred fusees they had contracted to be repaired in Plymouth. The gunsmiths declared in a deposition that the weapons in question had not been cleaned and repaired in a workmanlike manner and were therefore not suitable for market.17 This incident demonstrates how troublesome it was for the RAC to monitor the condition of and repair its goods, adding yet another set of costs the company had to absorb.
The third major category of goods that the RAC sent to Upper Guinea, after textiles and metalwares, was beads, arguably one of the most misunderstood items in world trade, frequently characterized disparagingly as “trinkets.” Eric Williams, famous historian of Britain’s African trade, presented a particularly contemptuous version of this stereotype: “The slave cargoes were incomplete without the “pacotille,” the sundry items and gewgaws which appealed to the Africans’ love of bright colors and for which, after having sold their fellows, they would, late in the nineteenth century, part with their land and grant mining concessions.”18
So goes the “gewgaw myth” that ignorant primitives could be hoodwinked into giving up valuable goods, property, and even people with the offer of worthless trinkets.19