DANISH SOURCES FOR THE HISTORY OF GHANA, 1657-1754

Danish Sources for the History of Ghana, 1657-1754. Edited by Ole Justesen; translated by James Manley. Fontes Historiae Africanae, Series Varia VIII. Copenhagen: Del Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, 2005. 2 vols. Pp. xxxviii, 1058; 4 maps. DKK 600 [about $105]. These two volumes present English translations and supporting commentary for 461 documents conserved in Danish archives and describing West Africans’ increasing integration into the early modern Atlantic world. The chronologically organized collection opens with a 1657 contract between Heinrich Carloff, a veteran employee of the Guinea trade for Dutch and Swedish companies, and Frederik III, the newly independent king of Denmark and Norway, to seize Swedish trading stations in West Africa. Documents for subsequent years include official reports that Africa-based officials sent to their European directors, correspondence between these officials and their colleagues stationed elsewhere on the African littoral, lists of debtors, fort diaries, and more. These are rich sources of historical information, particularly for the life histories of individual Africans usually obscured in published travelogues. Scholars might use these personal histories to draw larger patterns of change. Otherwise the documentation reinforces much of that already known about precolonial African politics, commerce, and Danish-African relations. The work concludes in 1754 with the dissolution of the Danish West India and Guinea Company and reorganization of the kingdom’s trade through other entities-though Danes remained active and prolific authors of historical documentation through the mid-nineteenth century. The editor, Ole Justesen, and his project collaborators present a resource that scholars of diverse disciplinary backgrounds will find welcoming. Three indexes direct readers to places and peoples, named persons, and topics. Annotation clarifies issues left vague in the original texts, often by referencing further documents in this collection or other contemporary accounts. Because much of the source material concerns trade, the relevant weights, measures, and numismatics are explained in the introduction in order to avoid repetition in footnotes. Readers will likely not find the editor’s interventions to be distracting. Four informative maps are also appended, which come as a pleasant surprise, not having been mentioned in the introduction or annotation. The authors of these records mostly wrote in Danish, but also composed a significant minority of the documents in German and Dutch (particularly for the early period covered in volume one) as well as in French and English.