Settlements, Trade, and Politics in the 17th Century Gold Coast

"Ray Kea’s book is a classic. It was an instant classic when it first came out in the early 1980s. Ray Kea studied at the University of London. He also spent time at the University of Ghana at Legon, which was an intellectual hub in the 1960s and 70s, into the early 80s, much like Ibadan in Nigeria and Dakar in Senegal. These were intellectual powerhouses, and many notable Africanist historians cut their teeth at Legon. Many of the Africanist archaeologists, historians and other social scientists cut their teeth in these intellectual centers. Ray Kea came out of that center in the 1970s and joined Johns Hopkins in the early 80s. That’s when he published his book. It was really a slow-cooked dissertation that was greatly revised after years of additional research, based on a very close reading of Portuguese, Danish, Dutch, and English sources that laid out the fine texture and scale of local and global exchanges. We’re talking about the ideas and actions of local indigenous peoples and their interaction with various European empires: the Dutch Empire, the Portuguese Empire, and the Danish Empire. Kea takes us through scales of international global trade, regional commerce, and all the in-between actions, in terms of conflicts, politics, and the conflicts between the powerful big men who controlled the movement of goods and people and gold, at the level of the village and the district. He takes a fine-grained approach across different scales and introduces us to a cast of characters— highway bandits, thugs, ritual specialists — as well as festivals, and also the big globalized transatlantic slaving transaction that took place and makes the modern world what it is. I chose that book because of the way in which it takes us through these various scales in a very detailed account of the 17th- and 18th-century Gold Coast."