The Political Economy of the Interior Gold Coast

The Asante and the Era of Legitimate Trading, 18071875

By (author) Jarvis L. Hargrove

Not available to order

Publication date:

09 December 2015

Length of book:

256 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739187869

This book analyzes the Gold Coast and the Asante kingdom in the years following the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade and prior to the start of colonial rule. The Asante state, one of the largest in the Gold Coast and West Africa after the eighteenth century is the central focus of this work. Studying their transition from a large scale supplier of captives to the transatlantic slave trade to traders in legitimate goods is a critical component that should be analyzed across West Africa. This work highlights the political and economic relationships between the interior Asante state with surrounding African groups and Europeans, chiefly British traders who entered the region in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Chapter 2: The Akan and the Formation of the Asante State
Chapter 4: The Gold Coast, Abolition Laws and the Era of Illegal Slave Trading, 1776–1842
Chapter 5: Economic Transition within Greater Asante in the Mid-nineteenth Century
Chapter 6: The Asante–British Treaties and Conflicts, 1817–1874

Hargrove’s study provocatively asks us to consider the roles of Africans in ending the transatlantic slave trade. By placing the end of the slave trade on the Gold Coast (Ghana) within the context of the much longer history of transatlantic trade and diplomacy in West Africa, this work offers a new perspective from which to assess Asante’s history as an economic and political power. It is among an important group of new works that insist on the inseparable qualities of African history and the history of the African diaspora.