Conclusion

Summary

By 1807 southern Ghana was a very different place from the Gold Coast of 1700. The coastal population had achieved a degree of political and commercial unity that would have been unimaginable at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The coast towns were linked by a highly efficient network of communication that enabled them to orchestrate their responses to the constantly shifting circumstances of the Atlantic trade. Armed militia units were present in every coastal town, ready to execute the instructions of coalition leaders. People across the region spoke a common language and had a sense of their shared dependence on the shrine of Nananom Mpow. The number of captives sold on the coast was declining dramatically, falling to fewer than one thousand captives sold per year in the first decade of the nineteenth century, compared to more than ten thousand annually throughout much of the eighteenth century. Agents of England’s Company of Merchants Trading to Africa began to question their purpose on the coast in light of the British Abolition Act, which made the slave trade from Africa illegal. The era of the slave trade was abruptly drawing to an end, and a new era, in which Asante would become an even mightier military power in the hinterland, was dawning.

The formation of the Coastal Coalition in the era of the slave trade stands out from other cases of political transformation in Atlantic Africa for its success in political unification without centralization of power under a king. The new elites who formed the coalition crafted strategies to effectively manipulate European agents of the English and Dutch trading companies in ways that exploited Ghana’s unique fort-based trade system. The extent to which they successfully implemented those strategies was distinctive and remarkable in the history of Atlantic Africa. At the same time, the Coastal Coalition developed in other ways that reflected the experiences of coastal populations across Atlantic Africa, from Senegal to Angola. The violence associated with the slave trade necessitated changes in political organization among coastal societies all along the Atlantic seaboard of Africa and caused widespread militarization among them. Violence also encouraged the cultivation of war shrines, such as Nananom Mpow, throughout Atlantic Africa and created incentives for groups to renegotiate cultural identities and boundaries.