The Peopling of an African Slave Port: Annamaboe and the Atlantic World

Abstract

Annamaboe, located on the Gold Coast in modern-day Ghana, was a sleepy Fante fishing village when Dutch traders arrived there in 1638. The arrival of the Europeans ushered Annamaboe into the Atlantic world and brought fundamental changes to the town’s physical landscape, economic and cultural life, and literally to its DNA as Europeans and Africans formed relationships that gave rise to a substantial mixed-race population. Like other Atlantic towns and cities, Annamaboe grew as a conduit for trade. Its traders funneled African trade goods -primarily enslaved peoples but also gold, maize and other provisions - to Europe and the Americas and it brought in a variety of products from Europe and around the world in exchange - fabrics, metals, manufactured goods, alcohol and tobacco - and distributed those goods into the interior. The Atlantic world is defined by the movement of goods, ideas and peoples around it, and much of that movement operated through the urban hubs that grew up around the Atlantic. Much of the scholarship on the Atlantic world has focused on the North Atlantic, particularly on the British Atlantic. This article’s focus on an African Atlantic port offers an important corrective to that bias, a necessary one if we are to fully comprehend that world.