Colleen Kriger provides a critical analysis of European-African trade over the sixteenth century in her highly readable and remarkably detailed Making Money: Life, Death and the Early Modern Trade on Africa's Guinea Coast. In a concise 200 pages, Kriger uses individual case studies to highlight larger patterns of trade, the pre-slavery origins of West African trade, the rise of European actors in the region and the interaction between Africans and both individual European traders and the Royal African Company (RAC) which allowed both Europeans and West Africans to make money.
Kriger opens the book by providing an extensive and useful overview of the routes and patterns of West African trade, along with the various forms of currencies (and their movement and fluctuation in value). She demonstrates how traders profited, especially from the movement of goods from low-demand to high-demand areas, before the start of the slave trade and the emergence of European trading companies. In highlighting these trading networks and relationships, she argues that the RAC evolved into one of the many merchants in West Africa involved in the extensive trading that overlapped with, but not yet dominated by the slave trade. Kriger then highlights how West Africans were able to profit from the arrival of the RAC by supplying goods, renting land, and providing permission to operate. The RAC needed to work with local kings and important men, at a much higher cost than many anticipated, and integrate itself into pre-existing trading patterns and institutionalized relationships if the company was to be accepted and therefore successful. Individual traders, including women, became highly instrumental to this burgeoning trade, obtaining goods on credit with the company and using their knowledge of the local markets to bring sought after commodities to the local communities in exchange for captives/slaves and ivory, among other goods. In demonstrating these relationships, the author highlights how local actors, especially from the existing Luso-African community with ties to overlapping Atlantic and West African worlds, were able to benefit from the company's presence and use already existing networks of trade to move goods; at the same time, the RAC relied on these networks for its survival and profit. Fascinatingly and importantly, the author highlights how many of these traders were the widows of European or African traders, thus adding a discussion of gender and complicating what many assume is a male-dominated trade.
The author then demonstrates patterns of enslavement and the lived experiences of degradation and captivity. In what is perhaps the best chapter, the author shows how the captives were not passive victims. Despite the harsh conditions in West African forts, slaves rebelled against or fled from company control and worked to reclaim their agency, if only for a brief moment. The author also addresses the often overlooked issue of the company using slaves in West Africa. She then examines how slaves, although still one of many commodities, were instrumental in broader patterns of trade, as they often were forced to transport goods before being sold to the RAC, thus generating an even higher profit for the traders. Lastly, the author examines what she terms the “free agents” of the European-African trade and shows how marriages between European traders and Africans were encouraged and contributed to the continuation of the trade arrangement and, as provisioners of goods, needed for the success of the RAC.
The main contribution Kriger provides is a conclusive demonstration of how the RAC engaged with and benefited from pre-existing trading networks, promoted economic opportunities, and influenced social dynamics throughout the region. Thus, the RAC became as much an African actor as a European one, and both the company's workers and the Africans they traded with straddled both worlds. In doing so, Kriger highlights the local factors and social dynamics that influenced the global movement of goods and how individual actors used the changes brought by the RAC to enhance their ability to profit through the trade of new and more desirable commodities. Through this examination, the author demonstrates the importance of African agency in influencing and profiting from larger trading patterns. Thus, the RAC became ingrained into African society as the company, and its workers needed to adapt to local customs and trading practices, and as its workers married African women. Additionally, throughout the book, the author discusses the fluid connection between local and global events, including European wars such as the War of the League of Augsburg, and how such events affected these relationships and trading patterns. Overall, both Africans and Europeans adapted to these new opportunities, patterned on existing customs, and, through this engagement, experienced mixed fortunes but remained focused on making money.
Although a minor issue in an otherwise very well written and well-argued book, Kriger's lack of engagement with certain historiographies constitutes a lost opportunity. The author's understanding of precolonial African trading patterns and networks dating back to the 1500s and use of the literature of both precolonial trading networks and the slave trade is quite strong. She even provides a further reading section that students of the subject would find very useful for additional study. However, in her discussion on how local demands shaped the trading goods brought into the West African coast, some comparison or acknowledgment of Jeremy Presthodt's Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization (2008) would have been useful. Although focusing on different regions and periods, both authors provide connections between local reactions to global trade flows and the need of European companies to cater to African demands, which remains a critical factor in understanding trading patterns and interactions. Also, in her examination of mixed-race marriages and families established by European traders taking on African wives, a broader analysis of the more significant issues surrounding this topic would have been beneficial. The last decade has witnessed a dramatic growth in this sub-field, and while Kriger's work highlights instances of the first generation of European-African relationships, the significance of this contribution is unexplored.
Despite this minor limitation, Kriger provides a valuable contribution regarding the involvement of Africans in global trading patterns, especially the developing slave trade, European-African commercial and personal interactions and the desire of both sides to maximize their ability to make money. Considering the concise nature of the monograph, Kriger writes in an engaging and readable style that makes use of individual case studies and autobiographies to make the book both engaging for upper-level undergraduates and rewarding for specialists on the region. Both audiences stand to benefit from the inclusion of larger blocks of sources scattered throughout the book. Kriger engages with the already mined archives of the RAC to provide an analysis of the individual actors, both Africans as well as Europeans, who were involved with the trade and she uses these sources to highlight new examples of African agency and involvement with the RAC. Thus, she provides students of the subject with an example of the muddled nature of history that should allow for fruitful class discussions. With such a strong focus on source materials, this reading would also be useful in methodology classes. Students of history at all levels, those interested in global trade and specialists in Atlantic and African history and the early modern world all stand to gain by reading this book.
