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.