This new book by Randy J. Sparks comes at an important moment. The recent articles by Lisa A. Lindsay and James H. Sweet in this journal, in the Forum on ‘Slavery and the Atlantic World’, emphasised how historians of this subject have repositioned the debate in the past decade.Footnote ¹ There is now a renewed critique of the limits of agency within structural parameters of violence and extraversion, and a call for a reboot of the source base for the study of West African histories in this context. Any historian working in this area must therefore balance a complex interplay of themes: the charged racism of the history and early historiography of the subject; the imperative to find West African voices for West African history; and, the need to show that West Africa was not cut off from the world as an earlier Eurocentric tradition posited, but rather that its peoples were integral to the world's modernising process in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

This interplay poses a challenging set of demands for professional historians at a time when institutional pressures are growing year by year. Put simply competition in ‘global league’ tables, and among historians, does not sit comfortably with the daunting task of producing resonant and balanced histories of this subject of excruciating importance, sadness, and complexity. Considered renewals of approaches to West African histories in this era cannot be done as quickly as Heads of Faculty might require; meanwhile, other fields such as Atlantic history grow rapidly, with the consequent danger that West Africa might once again be left out of a narrative of global change at a key moment.

Sparks' book seeks to bridge this gap by incorporating the Fante peoples of Anamabo, a thriving Gold Coast port in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, into an Atlantic paradigm. Drawing on archival and printed English sources, Sparks recreates in admirable detail the various communities in Anamabo and their interactions. The aim is to show how this one Gold Coast port was a key Atlantic site, and, by extension, how West Africans in ports such as Anamabo helped construct the modernising process of Atlantic history. As the eye-catching title implies, the book seeks to reclaim political control and agency for Fante peoples and underscores how European actors did not dictate terms of the trade.

To achieve this narrative aim, Where the Negroes are Masters is divided into seven main chapters that both bring Anamabo into an Atlantic domain and reveal the complexities of interaction through focussing on microhistories, something recently championed in this field by Roquinaldo Ferreira.Footnote ² After an opening chapter which places Anamabo in context, Sparks uses the next two chapters to look at Anamabo through the lives of very different individuals: in Chapter Two, we meet John Corrantee, a leading Fante trader and an active ‘middleman’ in the trade, and, in Chapter Three, we are introduced to Richard Brew, an Anglo-Irish trader who became a major figure in Anamabo and whose mixed-race children became key go-betweens in the late eighteenth century. Chapters Four and Five view the links in the ‘trade’ from African and American perspectives: in Chapter Four, Sparks analyses the process of enslavement in the Gold Coast region and the importance of the pawnship institution already well analysed by scholars such as Paul Lovejoy and David Richardson,Footnote ³ while in Chapter Five we see how this fitted into the rum trade sailing out of Newport, Rhode Island. In Chapter Six, Sparks moves helpfully away from the slave trade to trace the different figures from Anamabo, usually either princes or Euro-African middlemen, who travelled around the Atlantic World and interpellated their knowledge of it back into Fante communities at Anamabo. Finally, in Chapter Seven, Sparks shows how Anamabo fell with the advance of the Ashanti and the British abolition of the trade, both in 1807.

Sited in the interplay of Fante and European forces, Sparks' book is directed at both a general and an Atlanticist audience. This is to be welcomed, since the resolute failure of public discourses to engage with the new contours of the field discussed by Lindsay and Sweet is problematic. Moreover, the lack of proper African perspectives in so much of Atlantic history often seems to allow that field merely to be (re)construed as the recreation of imperial narratives of Western dominance. Thus, it must be hoped that the book will stimulate discussion of these questions, and the realisation that, contrary to the early review of the book in Publishers Weekly, Where the Negroes are Masters is very far from offering a ‘unique approach’.

Nevertheless, Sparks' book raises as many problems as it answers. In its broad thematic, his narrative reproduces the argument of Rebecca Shumway's recent book, without due acknowledgement or the same richness of sources used in her work.Footnote ⁴ Where Shumway used oral sources as well as written ones, Sparks' reliance on purely archival sources comes to reproduce that perspective; this is surely the only way in which he can have come to use phrases such as ‘once the ship was slaved’ (p. 158). Further reading in and engagement with the historiography of the Gold Coast would also have helped Sparks to avoid the essentialisation of ‘the Fante’ and their politics (something ably analysed by Shumway and Robin Law), and errors in discussing the emergence of maize cultivation and its relationship to population growth, recently discussed by J. D. LaFleur, Judith Carney, and Richard Rosomoff.Footnote ⁵

Sparks' approach brings to light both the benefits and limitations of two conceptual frames that have dominated the study of West Africa and the Atlantic world for some time: agency and ‘the Atlantic’. Though he makes efforts to reach beyond slavery in Chapter Six's account of free movement by people from Anamabo in the Atlantic, the predominance of the question of the slave trade in his book reminds the reader that within an Atlantic paradigm the role of West African societies as ‘producers of slaves’ remains paramount. This role inevitably leans towards essentialisiation of peoples such as ‘the Fante’, in the categorical mode of imperial thought, which scholars such as Jean-Loup Amselle and P. F. de Moraes Farias have contrasted to West African modes of knowledge-production.Footnote ⁶

Meanwhile, the agency paradigm, though often doing useful work, has a tendency to shift the focus onto African actors in producing slaves and distracts from considering the structural violence and inequalities in trade that permitted the system to grow. This has been a strong feature of this literature and emphasises the limitations of too strong a focus on this thematic; when Sparks writes how one archival quote ‘does suggest how the Fante shifted the blame for the trade onto the Europeans’ (p. 157), the reader is reminded of the way in which the focus on African agency can morph into a moral debate reminiscent of Abolition narratives, of guilt and responsibility, and at times of ‘passing the buck’.

The problem therefore in producing West African history for an Atlantic ‘market’ is that the importance of the discourses and history of West Africa itself tends to be occluded. Thus far, this debate can sometimes reproduce Eurocentric discourses. In the end, therefore, Where the Negroes are Masters provokes thought as to how West Africa can and should be incorporated into global and Atlantic histories and about how West African historical discourses can be reproduced among global ones. For this alone, it is worth reading.