Cultural and Social History of Ghana From the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century: The Gold Coast in the Age of Trans-atlantic Slave Trade (two Book Set)

Using a wide range of documentation, [the author] constructed in remarkable detail the commercial, political, social and military configurations, first, of the coastal towns where the shore establishments of the European companies were located, and second, of communities particularly in the basins of the Ankobra, Tano and Pra-Ofin rivers, where the flows of commodities to and from the coast were organized by the powerful Akani merchants.”-Prof. Ivor Wilks, Emer., Northwestern University Honorary Professor, University of Wales at Lampeter.

“not a political or military history of Asante or Akwamu even though military and political actions of these powerful inland kingdoms had effect on the Atlantic commerce. Rather, he focuses on the social and cultural life of the coastal towns and the dynamics and contradictions of relations as impacted by the ethos of the transoceanic trade in human bodies.”-Prof. David Owusu-Ansah, James Madison University

"This a welcome capstone to the career of Ray Kea, now emeritus, reads as an ambitious extension of his prior on the 'Gold Coast' of West Africa that later became incorporated into the twentieth-century nation state of Ghana. ... they will recognize how much here is new, and how it challenges them to think differently about otherwise familiar scholarly terrain." -Prof. J.D. La Fleur, University of Virginia, Charlottesville

List of Figures

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Who Makes History?

The Atlantic Slave Trade

Summary of Chapters

PART ONE: TEXTS

Chapter One Hans Lykke of Osu
Hermeneutics
A Death-Wish
Writing Hans Lykke
History Continues
Noete/Note Doku
Klama and Kpele Hermeneutics
Dominion
The Akwamu Factor
The Lumo and the Company
The Lumo as Ma?nyo
Akwamu Politics
Rebellion
A Counter-Narrative
Rebellion
Life and Death
The Idea of Hans Lykke
Chapter Two History, Commerce, and Texts
Texts and Commerce
The Ordering of Things
Texts and Gold Coast History
Labor
Work as a Condition of Life
A Mason’s Imagination
History as Critique
The Question of the Present
Identifying the Authors
An Historical Imagination
Imaginaries
The Imaginative Dimension in History
Counter-Factual Yearning

PART TWO: SERVICE

Chapter Three The Company’s Servant: Sodsha Duomoro Social and Trading Capital
Biography and Atlantic Slaving
A Cognitive and Social Order
A Politics of Location
The Son of a Famous Man
Household Property
Working for the Company
Cultural and Symbolic Capital
Values and Meanings
The Aesthetics and Metaphysics of Power
The Cultural Domain of Coutymer
The Politics of Property
A Life in the Eighteenth Century

PART THREE: RESISTANCE

Chapter Four Subalterns and Social Struggle
Rethinking What We Know
“History to the Defeated”
Social Transcripts
Places of Sanctuary
Subalterns
“Plundering on the General Road”
Unmastered Men
“His master should never get another day’s work out of him” Social Inversion
Liminality and History
Agency and the Terrain of Social Struggle
Chapter Five A Rebel and an Abolitionist
“Giving Import to Lives on the Margins”
Atlantic Slaving and Historical Agency
Kwasi the Blacksmith and Rebel
Mutiny in Christiansborg Castle
Plotting Rebellion on St. Croix
A Life of Defeat
‘‘Life is fury’’
Life in Edwumako-Asene
Enslavement
Confronting History in the Idea of Abolition
The Modernity of the Unimaginable
Glossary

Endnotes

Abbreviations and Bibliography

Index

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