Making Money: Life, Death, and Early Modern Trade on Africa's Guinea Coast by Colleen Kriger (review)

Although dozens of historians have examined African participation in the Atlantic slave trade over the course of the last two decades, Colleen Kriger's new study of trade on the upper Western African coast between roughly 1680 and 1715 deserves attention for its innovative reading of British archival sources and its rich array of evidence. The main subject of Making Money lies in the daily lives and strategic goals of European and African merchants as well as African political leaders. Using correspondence from the Royal Africa Company, the author manages to both place the dynamics of the Western African slave trade in a global context and capture how individuals (African and European alike) tried to maximize their ability to produce wealth and defend their own personal interests. Kriger, a scholar well-respected for her earlier work on cloth and iron objects, provides a detailed review of the trading options available for interior and coastal West Africans. Muslim traders with ties to trans-Saharan commercial networks sought out cotton cloth from coastal regions, even as Europeans sought out slaves along with various locally-made items and natural products such as wood and ivory. Kriger's broad scope involving European, Indian, and African workers and merchandise reflects a holistic approach to economic history reminiscent of the Annales School. One value of this study for non-specialists lies in the ways Kriger picks apart simplistic notions of barter economies by noting the shifting value and composition of bundles of goods. Determining what constituted a collection of varied merchandise required a high degree of cultural intelligence. African and European traders alike needed to keep track of varied tastes as well as the challenging art of conducting negotiations with Western African merchants.

The second half of the book examines the ways individuals sought to enrich themselves and expand their social networks, particularly in Senegambia. While historians have examined Atlantic trade in most individual sections of the Western African coast, this book centres on the Gambia River, a region not well covered by other researchers. Members of the Royal Africa Company established forts on James Island on the mouth of the Gambia River, Bunce Island in the Sierra Leone Estuary, and York Island off Shebro Island in what is now the southern part of Sierra Leone. These settlements remained under the influence of local rulers who acted as landlords. Where Kriger especially stands out from other studies is her use of individual trader's careers to illustrate the complexity of the relationships between local political leaders and Atlantic merchants. For example, Luso-African trader Peter Vaz carefully established a wholesale trading business that was taken over by his wife for another decade after his death. Instead of focusing only on slave trading, Kriger highlights how European and Indigenous traders exchanged a wide variety of merchandise along with captives. This is not to suggest Making Money avoids the brutality of the slave trade. Again, the wealth of information in the Royal Africa Company archives allows Kriger to use noteworthy details. For example, English slave captains sometimes tried to make captives dance using West African instruments the sailors themselves did not know how to play. English traders may have purchased Africans to sell in the Americas, but company slaves who stayed in their English forts sometimes became traders in their own right.

The author's skillful deciphering of Royal African Company ledgers allows her to reconstruct trading ventures, individual efforts to save income, and various business arrangements. Still another innovation in Making Money is the attention to how coastal African women tried and often succeeded in protecting their economic interests. Though the importance of African women in forming intimate and commercial relationships with European men has long been recognized, Kriger moves beyond generalizations about female traders through Royal African Company records. Women such as Hope Heath joined English traders in running a business, sharing...