A Cultural and Social History of Ghana from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century

A study that examines the African side of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and proposes a fresh approach to an understanding of early Atlantic and Gold Coast modernity. It engages the historical phenomenology of the Gold Coast urban by presenting biographical profiles and the self-activity of named individuals and social groups.

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This study examines the African side of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and proposes a new approach to an understanding of early Atlantic and Gold Coast modernity. The thematic framework allows the study to pursue cultural, material, social, and biographical lines that intersected the inter-connections of Gold Coast urbanism and Atlantic mercantile circuits within a world-economy context. The thematic framework of this book allows the study to pursue cultural, material, social, and biographical lines that intersected the inter-connections of Gold Coast urbanism and Atlantic mercantile circuits within a world-economy context. Based on a close examination of archival documents, published oral histories and traditions, and the data of archaeological fieldwork, the work considers the broader empirical and theoretical implications of these relationships. The Gold Coast urbanization process was closely tied to an expanding Atlantic World mercantile economy and its slave trade and this process was defined by modes of commodity circulation and mercantile accumulation as well as by social forms of consciousness and identity and public and hidden discourses.
The study engages the historical phenomenology of the Gold Coast urban by presenting biographical profiles and the self-activity of named individuals (ranging in status from slaves to merchants and rulers) and social groups (from brigands to priests) who pursued their beliefs, thoughts, imaginaries, and motivations in dynamic cultural, moral, political, and symbolic economies.