When all the liquid World was one extended Thames
Early Modern British Prospects in West African Estuaries
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3273432 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Catherine Molineux (Vanderbilt University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 97 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 563-601 |
| Publication date | 2025-09-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of Modern History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0022-2801 • E-ISSN: 1537-5358 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/736819 |
| OpenAlex | W4413754139 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 35 |
This essay examines how cross-cultural politics and local ecologies shaped early modern British imperial structures by focusing on the Royal African Company’s efforts to exploit West African estuaries for economic and political advantage. Company agents pursued two strategies to integrate these tropical estuaries into a mercantilist imperial framework: prospecting, which sought to render estuarine productivity legible from across the Atlantic, and settling, which involved manipulating local trade dynamics and mobilizing both human and nonhuman forces to serve company interests. Environmental obstacles and African and European competition, however, hampered these ambitions. The result was the formation of hybrid waterscapes that reflected the entanglement of British imperial aspirations with local power dynamics and estuarine ecologies. In response to these challenges, a grassroots coastal trade emerged in the late seventeenth century to offset the difficulty of controlling any single river system. This evolving structure strengthened Britain’s Atlantic slave trade by facilitating the movement of captives, improving access to labor, and reducing shipboard mortality. It also encouraged a shift toward an aggregate estuarine strategy centered on the more secure, nonestuarine outpost of Cape Coast Castle. Drawing on the company records, travel narratives, and environmental histories, this essay argues that attending to the political ecology of estuaries reveals the adaptive and contested nature of British imperial expansion in West Africa
Archaeology · Estuary · Geography · Political science · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Geology · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Oceanography
A Fistful of Shells
In the Nature of Cities
Casualties of Credit
Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade
The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589
Where the Negroes Are Masters
The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas
Mosquito Empires
Three Forms of Political Ecology
Urban Political Ecology. Theoretical concepts, challenges, and suggested future directions
Privateering as a language of international politics
Seasonal work and welfare in an early industrial town
Post-medieval archaeological remains recorded on the River Thames foreshore in Greater London
Freedom’s Debt
The White Man's Grave
The Canoe in West African History
Hybrid Geographies
Navigability and the improvement of the river Thames, 1605–1815
Political ecology
Urban Political Ecology1
The Importance of Slavery and the Slave Trade to Industrializing Britain
Rethinking Mercantilism
Eco-Prospecting in Early Modern Wetlands
African Indigo in the French Atlantic
After Nature
Against Political Ecology
| Highly cited | No |
|---|