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  • Where the Negroes are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade by Randy J. Sparks
  • Kenneth Morgan
Where the Negroes are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade. By Randy J. Sparks (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2014) 309 pp. $29.95

In recent years, historians have investigated West African ports that were important hubs of maritime commerce in general and the slave trade in particular. Studies of Ouidah, in the Bight of Benin, and of Cape Coast Castle, on the Gold Coast, have illuminated the interplay between cultural and economic factors that underpinned the trade of these ports.1 As Sparks shows in this book, however, there is plenty of scope for further studies of specific African ports. Sparks concentrates on Annamaboe (now Anomabu) on the Gold Coast during the eighteenth century when it flourished as a supply center for the transatlantic slave trade. Annamaboe had a fort maintained by England’s Royal African Company [End Page 259] and later by its successor, the Company of Merchants trading to Africa. England dominated the slave trade at Annamaboe, but French, Dutch, and American merchants also traded there. As Chapter 5 shows, Rhode Island merchants gained a significant niche in slaving at Annamaboe during the quarter-century before the American Revolution through the lucrative trade of New England rum.

Sparks draws mainly upon the extensive archives of the Royal African Company at the National Archives, Kew, to analyze the wide range of personnel involved in the slave trade at Annamaboe and to explain the activities of white traders, mainly associated with the Royal African Company. He also discusses caboceers (headmen or officials), inland suppliers of slaves, agents who handled gold and the sale of slaves, European ship captains, African canoe men, members of African elites, and others who interacted in trade at Annamaboe, as well as the widespread practice of pawning as collateral against credit.2 Chapter 4 provides a helpful description of the stages involved in the enslavement process on the Gold Coast. The entire book provides detailed information about the various people, Africans as well as Europeans, who were culpable in their exploitation of slaves. It explains the supply of slaves to Annamaboe in relation to kidnapping, punitive raids, and inland wars conducted between the dominant Fante and their enemies.

Although this book is impressive, it could have been better. Sparks makes little use of French or Dutch sources to examine trade rivalries between Europeans at Annamaboe. Chapter 5 would have benefited from the extensive documentation available in archival material in New York and New England about the conduct of the Rhode Island exchange of rum for slaves on the Gold Coast. Chapter 3, about Richard Brew, an Irish trader on the Gold Coast, should have made it clearer to the reader that Priestley’s book, mentioned in a few footnotes, studied him in depth, and the book’s coverage of the gender dimension of slave trafficking at Annamaboe is far too brief.3 Most surprisingly, Sparks makes only desultory reference to the storehouse of information on Annamaboe in the online Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, which he could have been deployed far more effectively to trace fluctuations in the volume of the slave trade from Annamaboe.4 Incorporation of these additional factors would have enhanced the quality of the book.

The final verdict on this book, however, is positive. Even without the benefit of any interdisciplinary methodology, Sparks has written an insightful study of an important African port involved in the slave trade. [End Page 260] His explanations of diplomacy and tactics will be of interest to all scholars who study the history of the Atlantic world. He demonstrates that Africans along the Gold Coast who willingly traded fellow Africans into transatlantic slaving were able to amass considerable wealth. The lack of a consolidated bibliography is an inconvenience, but the book contains a helpful appendix of important terms, names, and places.

Kenneth Morgan
Brunel University

Footnotes

1. Robin Law, Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving Port, 1727–1892 (New York, 2004); William St. Clair, The Grand Slave Emporium: Cape Coast Castle and the British Slave Trade...

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