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Chapter  ‘‘A Spirit of Liberty’’ Slave Labor in Gold Coast Castles and Forts The ill health and high mortality rates endured by Britons on the Gold Coast often meant that ‘‘no other than Blackworkmen [sic] of any signi- fication’’ were available to RAC officials. As a consequence, British forts and their trading operations necessarily depended more heavily upon the labor of Africans and mulattoes than on the work of British craftsmen, laborers, soldiers, and sailors. Some of these West Africans were enslaved or free wage laborers from the local community, others were the mulatto offspring of white RAC employees and local women, and a few were ‘‘pawns’’ whose labor belonged temporarily to the British. But by far the most significant category of British workers included the large contingent of ‘‘company,’’ ‘‘castle,’’ or ‘‘factory’’ slaves, who came to dominate the ranks of the British workforce between the mid-seventeenth and the late eighteenth centuries. The British slave trade could not have existed, let alone prospered, without this enslaved workforce in and around British forts and trading posts.1 In the late seventeenth century the RAC began a regular practice of buying slaves in Gambia and shipping them south to the Gold Coast, in order to maintain and reinforce a permanent bound workforce of skilled and unskilled company-owned Africans. For almost a century and a half, these men and women formed a constant and vital workforce within a larger Atlantic World, at the nexus of a trade that linked the British Isles, southern Asia, and the Americas. At a time when bound labor was undergoing radical changes in Barbados and elsewhere in British America, the situation of these company slaves remained relatively fixed, for their enslavement was defined primarily by West African norms. 140 African Bound Labor Familiar British ideas about the nature and practice of free and bound labor, as well as developing ideas about race and labor, confronted a radically different modus operandi on the coast of West Africa. In theory at least, Britons who in the later seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries signed indentures to serve three years on the Gold Coast were working in a British tradition that had already been adapted to colonial contexts in the Caribbean and North American colonies. However, any resemblance to life and work in Britain or in North America quickly evaporated in the face of horrific conditions, extremely high mortality rates, and relatively little chance of survival and an improvement in one’s situation. As a consequence, the lives of surviving British craftsmen, laborers, and soldiers and sailors on the Gold Coast were dramatically different from those of the majority of indentured servants in Britain’s North American colonies, although there were similarities with the bound laborers in mid-seventeenth-century Barbados.2 In contrast, company-owned enslaved Africans enjoyed comparatively good lives, far better than the enslaved men and women bound for New World plantations, and often apparently better than the lives of British laborers, artisans, and workers who were nominally bound only by indenture or contract. Throughout the late seventeenth and for most of the eighteenth centuries, these company slaves were protected against transportation to the Americas, and were thus guaranteed lives and working conditions molded more by West African traditions than British expectations. As such, these men, women, and children enjoyed a fair degree of agency, often living outside the British forts and trading posts. They received what was for all intents and purposes a wage with which they purchased food, clothing, and supplies, and they formed a remarkably independent and powerful group of workers. In West African society many slaves lived and functioned within family units, while others served in larger blocks as gold miners, soldiers, or attendants of rulers. All were regarded as occupying a station in life, one defined largely by labor and status, and castle slaves occupied a similar position. RAC officials found they had little choice but to regard their enslaved workforce as being composed of individuals who expected to be treated with respect. Thus, for example, British officials allowed castle slaves a great degree of freedom in family formation, and recognized the families that their enslaved workers formed. When, for example, the slave gardener was moved from Anomabu to Cape Coast Castle in 1778, ‘‘he with his Wife and 2 Children came up: it would have been (2024-04-19 00:53 GMT) ‘‘A Spirit of Liberty’’ 141 cruel to have parted the Family.’’ Such...

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