It has become something of a cliché, though nonetheless true, to state that the history of the Gold Coast is among the best-documented in sub-Saharan Africa. Some of the richest documentation is to be found in various archives in the Netherlands, and especially in the country's National Archive (Nationaal Archief, NA, previously known as the Algemeen Rijksarchief) at The Hague. The problem for Ghanaian and anglophone scholars generally has been that the records are almost entirely written in Dutch, a language few of them are familiar with. Consequently, English-language guides to what is available in the Netherlands have been indispensable aids, especially to anglophone researchers. Two such guides have appeared previously – P. Carson's Materials for West African History in the Archives of Belgium and Holland (1962) and M. Roessingh and W. Visser's Guide to the Sources of the History of Africa South of the Sahara in the Netherlands (1978) – but, as their titles indicate, neither was as focused on the history of the Gold Coast/Ghana and the Dutch National Archives as the work under review here.
The book is comprised of two parts of unequal length. Part I, the longer of the two, offers a comprehensive guide to the archives, which at first blush appears to add little to what was already available in Carson and Roessingh and Visser. But the NA has recently undergone substantial reorganization (as well as a name change), so this section of the book provides a valuable updating of those works. The authors organize the record groups in chronological order, using as cut-off dates the founding and demise of the West India Company (1621–1795). Record groups are listed with their official Dutch names together with English translations, size in meters, archival accession numbers, and accessibility (some records are in ‘poor condition’ and accessible principally on microfilm). Several record groups contain documents relevant to the history of the wider West African sub-region, especially those from the seventeenth century, and descriptions of these are included as well. Part I also has descriptions of a few holdings that are located outside the NA, among them the Furley Collection at the University of Ghana, and the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies in Leiden. While helpful, it is not clear why these collections were included, and not descriptions of arguably more important collections in the city archives of Middelburg, Rotterdam and Amsterdam. Nevertheless, the clearly organized and updated descriptions in Part I will be very useful to historians of Ghana intending to work primarily in the NA.
The book's substantive contribution, however, is found in Part II, ‘Thematic Descriptions’. Here are seven chapters, each with a brief essay on topics such as the Dutch administrative and judicial system on the Gold Coast, the kinds of data found in the archives concerning indigenous states and societies, economic relations, historical personalities, and so on. While there is a Eurocentric bias in the topics selected, in part a reflection of the sources themselves, and the timespan covered is generally limited to the precolonial era, each essay offers an original contribution to the historiography of Ghana and the Netherlands, as well as a useful thematic guide for further research in the NA. Each chapter also includes sidebars giving illustrative and often fascinating case studies drawn from archival documents, and pertinent tabular data derived from key secondary works or the archives themselves. These chapters may be read profitably by all historians of Ghana and not just those planning to work in the Dutch archives. In sum, the authors have performed a signal service to active and potential researchers in Ghana's history.
