Where the Negroes Are Masters

In this very useful and informative study historian Randy Sparks examines the development of a port called "Annamaboe" (Anomabo in current orthography)-the premier slave exporting port on the Gold Coast during the second half of the eighteenth century-within an Atlantic world context.He argues that Anomabo merchants were "as integral to Atlantic world commercial circuits as those of Liverpool, London, Cádiz, Nantes, Charleston, New York, or Kingston" (p. 3) and uses social biographies, or microhistory, to highlight the agency of Africans in the dynamics of eighteenth-century Atlantic world macrohistory.In addition to the main text, the work includes a glossary (of toponyms, personal names, and terms), endnotes, an index, four maps, and 23 illustrations, with bibliographic references included in the endnotes.Sparks consulted everything from the archival records of English trading companies to recent monographs on precolonial Ghanaian history, thus demonstrating the sheer scale and richness of the source materials pertaining to his theme.The first chapter traces the rise of Anomabo from a fishing village in the fifteenth century to a gold-exporting world port in the seventeenth and a slaveexporting port in the eighteenth and its relations with European trading companies, especially English companies.Chapter 2 follows the career of John Corrantee (d.1764), who is described as "a military commander, a skillful political leader, and a successful trader and diplomat" (p.35).Anomabo's growth in the 1750s owed much to his leadership and negotiating skills.Corrantee is portrayed as an essential link "between the Europeans on the coast and the African traders from the interior" (p.67).He used his sons to forge close ties with agents of British, French, and Dutch trading companies; they were "his own eyes and ears in Paris, London, and throughout the Atlantic World, as far afield as the plantations of Barbados" (p.67).Chapter 3 examines the career of Corrantee's son-in-law Richard Brew (d.1776), the second "most visible figure in Annamaboe during the eighteenth century" (p.68).An Irishman, Brew was employed by English trading companies, serving for a while as governor of the English fort in Anomabo.He built his own fort, "Castle Brew," as a residence and place of business.Sparks recognizes Brew's "deep integration into the eighteenth-century Atlantic World" (p.121), for Castle Brew "served as the hub of his business enterprise, which stretched up and down the [African] coast, into the African interior, to England, to Holland, and to the British colonies in America from the sugar islands to South

Ancient history · Archaeology · Atlantic World · Economic history · Fifteenth · Media studies · Microhistory · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Classics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Engineering · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law