10/3/2023 0 Comments African ports mapPortsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2000.Ī collection of eighteen essays from a 1996 conference at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Papers presented at a conference held on June 1996 at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. DeCorse 2016 explores the British forts of West Africa, while Da Silva 2017 broadly explores all of the West African trade forts.Īnderson, David M., and Richard Rathbone, eds. 2013 explores the place of Africans in an urban setting during the period of Atlantic slavery. The collection of essays found in Falola 2003 celebrates the career of the African scholar Abu Boahen and thus broadly deals with Ghana while providing specific essays on slavery and the slave trade. Three recent attempts to synthesize this knowledge, Thornton 1998, Northrup 2008, and Green 2019, have made the history of West Africa in this period more accessible to non-Africanists. As West Africa’s role within the slave trade became better understood, along with the numbers of Africans being removed from West Africa, historians have worked to understand how these Atlantic connections, which often occurred through ports, changed West African regions and societies. Other studies, including the pioneering but now revised work of Karl Polanyi ( Polanyi 1968), concerning “ports of trade” and the “archaic” economies of Africa, and Curtin 1984, an examination of “trade diasporas,” have worked to create an overall understanding of how West Africa changed during its engagement with Atlantic trade. An edited volume, Knight and Liss 1991 completely ignores Africa, while Anderson and Rathbone 2000 broadly examines Africa’s urban areas. There is one general study, Law and Strickrodt 1999, that deals with African ports, but there are numerous studies that allow for a conceptualization of African ports or that clearly demonstrate the need for specific studies on African ports. Instead, much of the history of West Africa in this period involves regional histories-of Senegambia, the Gold Coast, the Slave Coast, the Bight of Benin and Biafra, the Kingdom of Kongo, and West Central Africa-that connect the ports with the larger regional economic systems and that, for many, attempt to explain the consequences of the region’s participation in Atlantic trade and the slave trade. While these ports played an important role in this period, the number of individual histories of these ports remains quite small. During this period of Atlantic trade, numerous coastal ports developed that played an important economic, social, political, and cultural role in West Africa’s development, supplemented by a secondary coastal trading system that allowed trade where established ports did not exist. The first example of this was Portugal’s construction of São Jorge da Mina Castle (Elmina) in 1482 after receiving the permission of the local elite. This meant that many coastal towns, usually oriented toward fishing but often serving as market towns, quickly became important ports that connected the Atlantic trade to regional trade networks. The rise of Atlantic trade meant that those people with a coastal presence could establish themselves as middlemen between the Atlantic and the interior. While scholars once viewed West Africa’s participation in the Atlantic trade as entirely destructive, predominately because of the demographic consequences of the slave trade, coupled with a belief that the import of European and other global commodities destroyed indigenous manufacturing, thereby creating dependency, recent scholarship stresses African agency and Africa’s coastal control over the Atlantic trade. This initiated a process in which large sections of West Africa, from the Senegal and Gambia Rivers (Senegambia) to the Kingdom of Kongo, became involved in Atlantic trade. As European vessels sailed down the West African coastline, the coastal peoples interacted and traded with the newcomers as they sought to take advantage of the new opportunities presented to them. Starting in the fifteenth century, West Africa’s orientation started to change from being inward looking to the trans-Saharan caravan routes, where powerful and centralized states emerged near the Sahara to control this trade to the coastal regions, to an outward-looking Atlantic focus.
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