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Chapter  The Gold Coast Britons who sought to trade on the Gold Coast during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were required to treat the West Africans they encountered with respect, and to engage with, understand, and utilize local free and bound labor in ways that differed quite dramatically from both the early modern British Isles and the developing plantation society of Barbados. West Africans enjoyed the upper hand in negotiating with Europeans eager to establish trading posts, and as a result Africans exercised considerable control over the terms of trade. Just as significantly, English companies and traders quickly found that in order to keep their forts and trading posts operative and successful they needed not only workers from the British Isles, but also increasingly large numbers of free and enslaved West Africans. By the later seventeenth century newly developed Barbadian sugar plantations had become dependent upon the slaves purchased, stored, and then shipped from English trading posts on the West African coast. As a result, the African trade quickly became essential to the English. Familiar English categories of free and bound labor all but disappeared in and around the British castles, forts, and trading posts in West Africa. New labor categories and practices provided the foundation for commercial exchange between the British and West Africans, including the growing trade in enslaved Africans between West Africa and the Caribbean. Slavery in West Africa was a familiar and deeply rooted social system and mode of production, and ‘‘the institutionalization of enslavement, the formal structure of trade, and the codification of slavery in law and custom guaranteed that slavery was central to the production process.’’ On the Gold Coast Britons had to engage with an African labor system on African terms, and dependence on enslaved and free Africans required all Europeans on the The Gold Coast 37 coast to comprehend and utilize entirely new ideologies and practices of labor.1 European trading operations and the transatlantic slave trade built upon a trade in bound labor that had existed in Africa for centuries. In Europe, land functioned as the main form of wealth-producing property, but along the Gold Coast ‘‘No man claimeth any Land to himself; the King keeping all the Woods, Fields, and Land in his hands; so that they neither Sow nor Plant therein, but by his content and licence.’’ Consequently, throughout much of West Africa it was slaves rather than land that constituted the principal form of private property that could generate income; in Barbados and then other plantation societies in British America, these European and African systems would be combined. The holding, buying, and selling of slaves had traditionally allowed West Africans to profit from the assets inherent in the land, enabling individuals to enhance their wealth, power, and prestige. By the fifteenth century slaveholding had been institutionalized in the more densely populated interior of the Gold Coast, and slaves were employed in various ways, including agricultural labor, military service , and most especially gold mining.2 But until the arrival of European traders, coastal areas remained relatively marginal and less populated, with the result that slavery had been a rather less integral component of the small, peripheral, and relatively poor communities on the West African coastline. European observers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries described these societies as being composed of people of authority (kings, nobles, and the gentry), merchants (who were often people of authority with the power to direct and benefit from trade), occupational or professional castes (men who had learned and inherited their occupation from their fathers or masters, including doctors, musicians, and priests), the common people, servants and slaves, women, and children. There was a notable malleability in these categories, and almost any ‘‘free’’ man or woman could be reduced to various forms of servitude or dependence, while conversely, slaves or their descendants could be assimilated into the households and other groups to which they belonged, essentially becoming free. Moreover, while the earliest Europeans on the Gold Coast saw people in coastal societies whom they regarded as slaves, and while people there were bought and sold, it does not necessarily follow that there was a clearly defined slave class within these sparsely populated coastal societies. If slavery and bound E (2024-04-25 15:32 GMT) 38 Settings labor were familiar components of Gold Coast society, they were far from rigid and permanent in nature. It was only as trade and population increased in and after the seventeenth century...

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