First Published in 1973. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Collection of official documents"--Foreword.

The history of Ghana attracts popular interest out of proportion to its small size and marginal importance to the global economy. Ghana is the land of Kwame Nkrumah and the Pan-Africanist movement of the 1960s; it has been a temporary home to famous African Americans like W. E. B. DuBois and Maya Angelou; and its Asante Kingdom and signature kente cloth-global symbols of African culture and pride-are well known. Ghana also attracts a continuous flow of international tourists because of two historical sites that are among the most notorious monuments of the transatlantic slave trade: Cape Coast and Elmina Castles. These looming structures are a vivid reminder of the horrific trade that gave birth to the black population of the Americas. The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade explores the fascinating history of the transatlantic slave trade on Ghana's coast between 1700 and 1807. Here author Rebecca Shumway brings to life the survival experiences of southern Ghanaians as they became both victims of continuous violence and successful brokers of enslaved human beings. The era of the slave trade gave birth to a new culture in this part of West Africa, just as it was giving birth to new cultures across the Americas. The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade pushes Asante scholarship to the forefront of African diaspora and Atlantic World studies by showing the integral role of Fante middlemen and transatlantic trade in the development of the Asante economy prior to 1807. Rebecca Shumway is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh.

This volume investigates the shape and the development of scholarly and popular opinion about the British Empire over the centuries.

Since Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore, the fate of British convicts has burned brightly in the popular imagination. Incredibly, their larger story is even more dramatic--the saga of forgotten men and women scattered to the farthest corners of the British empire, driven by the winds of the American Revolution and the currents of the African slave trade. In A Merciless Place, Emma Christopher brilliantly captures this previously unknown story of poverty, punishment, and transportation. The story begins with the American War of Independence, until which many British convicts were shipped across the Atlantic. The Revolution interrupted this flow and inspired two entrepreneurs to organize the criminals into military units to fight for the crown. The felon soldiers went to West Africa's slave-trading posts just as the war ended; these forts became the new destination for England's rapidly multiplying convicts. The move was a disaster. Christopher writes that "before the scheme was abandoned, it would have run the gamut of piracy, treachery, mutiny, starvation, poisonings, allegations of white women forced to prostitute themselves to African men, and not least several cases of murder." To end the scandal, the British government chose a new destination, as far away as possible: Australia. Christopher here captures the gritty lives of Britain's convicts: victims of London's underworld, rife with brutal crime and sometimes even more brutal punishments. Equally fascinating are the portraits of Fante people of West Africa, forced to undergo dramatic changes in their role as intermediaries with Europeans in the slave trade. Here, too, are the aboriginal Australians, coping with the transformation of their native land. They all inhabit A Merciless Place: a tour de force and historical narrative at its finest.

Ghana has played a key role in African/Western relations since medieval times. For this reason and others, Ghana has evolved into a linguistic quilt that contains forty-four indigenous languages and several exotic ones, of which most Ghanians speak at least two. Using Accra, Ghana's capital, as a microcosm, Dakubu conducts a linguistic, historical, and ethnographic investigation of the origins and durability of this multilingualism and how it has effected Ghanaian society.

A uniquely detailed account of the dynamics of Afro-European trade in two states on the western Slave Coast over three centuries and the transition from slave trade to legitimate commerce.

These essays reexamine European forts in West Africa as hubs where different peoples interacted, negotiated and transformed each other socially, politically, culturally, and economically. This collection brings together scholars of history, archaeology, cultural studies, and others to present a nuanced image of fortifications, showing that over time the functions and impacts of the buildings changed as the motives, missions, allegiances, and power dynamics in the region also changed. Focusing on the fortifications of Ghana, the authors discuss how these structures may be interpreted as connecting Ghanaian and West African histories to a multitude of global histories. They also enable greater understanding of the fortifications’ contemporary use as heritage sites, where the Afro-European experience is narrated through guided tours and museums.

Though the history of slavery is a central topic for African, Atlantic world and world history, most of the sources presenting research in this area are European in origin. To cast light on African perspectives, and on the point of view of enslaved men and women, this group of top Africanist scholars has examined both conventional historical sources (such as European travel accounts, colonial documents, court cases, and missionary records) and less-explored sources of information (such as folklore, oral traditions, songs and proverbs, life histories collected by missionaries and colonial officials, correspondence in Arabic, and consular and admiralty interviews with runaway slaves). Each source has a short introduction highlighting its significance and orienting the reader. This first of two volumes provides students and scholars with a trove of African sources for studying African slavery and the slave trade.

The Asante World provides fresh perspectives on the Asante, the largest Akan group in Southern Ghana, and what new scholars are thinking and writing about the "world the Asante made." By employing a thematic approach, the volume interrogates several dimensions of Asante history including state formation, Asante-Ahafo and Bassari-Dagomba relations in the context of Asante northward expansion, and the expansion to the south. It examines the role of Islam which, although extremely intense for just a short time, had important ramifications. Together the essays excavate key aspects of Asante political economy and culture, exemplified in kola nut production, the kente/adinkra cloth types and their associated symbols, proverbs, and drum language. The Asante World explores the Asante origins of Jamaican maroons, Asante secular government, contemporary politics of progress, governance through the institution of Ahemaa or Queenmothers, epidemiology and disease, and education in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Featuring innovative and insightful contributions from leading historians of the Asante world, this volume is essential reading for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars concerned with African Studies, African diaspora history, the history of Ghana and the Gold Coast, the history of Islam in Africa, and Asante history.