Where The Negroes Are Master Book Summary

Where the Negroes Are Master: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade is a book written by Randy J. Sparks, who is Professor of History at Tulane University. On the Gold Coast during the eighteenth-century, Annamaboe was known as the largest slave trading post. The trading post was a home to very successful African merchants who had an odd partnership with some people in Europe. That made the town and the people that lived in the town, an extremely important part of the Atlantic’s exchange web. The port of Annamaboe was located in present day Ghana. The port brought the merchants into contact with people from the Royal African Company, Rhode Island Rum Men, European slave traders, and Africans who were captured from neighboring nations, daily. Since the leaders of Annamaboe were

working the port on their own land, they were able to negotiate with the Europeans to their advantage. With that advantage, the traders imported goods from the Atlantic to the African interior and shipped cargo of enslaved Africans to the Americans to do labor. African men and women played a major role in the networks of the slave trade. Randy Sparks captured the African people’s experience in great detail, uncovered how the slave trade began, how it functioned from day to day, and how it transformed life in Annamaboe and made the port a hub of Atlantic commerce.
The first chapter of the book talked about how Annamaboe joined the Atlantic World. It started out as a small fishing village and soon after the start of the eighteenth century, it was a thriving Atlantic hub. The first chapter also talked a little about the trading relationships that were starting to form between people of different places. The two chapters about John Corrantee, who was a military commander, a political leader, and a successful diplomat and trader, and Richard Brew, who was an Irish merchant, gave a timeline of all the things that two of Annamaboe’s most influential residents did. The fourth and the fifth chapters explained the process of slave trading and the routes of trade from the center of Africa to the coast. Sparks described the really tough trip that so many people had to endure across the Atlantis to places like Charleston, South Carolina, and Newport, Rhode Island. He also discussed some of the cruel activities that the slaves went through because of the Rhode Island Rum Men. The final two chapters went back to being about Annamaboe; first discussed was that Annamaboe was sometimes a part of a multidirectional Atlantic plied by African travelers. The second thing discussed in the last two chapters was tracing the decline of the slave trade after it was abolished in 1807, and how even though it was abolished, the trade didn’t stop until years afterwards.
Randy Sparks organized the book around a series of biographies of the town of Annamaboe, the men that lived there, the salve trading process, and some African travelers.

His audience for the book is academic and general audience who is interested in learning about the Atlantic slave trade, the people that were involved with it, and the town of Annamaboe. He begins with the major transformation of Annamaboe and how it grew and rose to become a powerful trading port, and how there was a shift from golf trading to slave trading during the eighteenth century. African tribal chiefs and slave traders, who were English, French, Dutch, and North American, often worked together, but people thought they only did so in order to punish rival tribes or favoring with the whites. Sparks did a great job of being very detailed when he discussed the way Annamaboe progressed and how it gained power, and it proved to people that the chiefs and the slave traders weren’t working together for only bad reasons. He made it very clear that at certain locations along the Gold Coast, native Africans were not only very active within the trade, but also very enthusiastic and voluntary with the

participants.
Sparks really brought the book to life by showing details from letter, conversations, and interactions between historical figures during the time. He really drew in the reader when he told the story of John Corrantee’s son, William Ansah Sessarakoo. His son, who was a price, left Annamaboe in 1747 and was captured and sold as a slave in Barbados. He later returned to his town in 1750 as a hero. John Corrantee was well known for his intricate trade policy negotiations with the British, French, and other Fante political leaders during the 1740s and 1750s. Richard Brew’s life was made interesting because of his connection of economic and familial relationships. There was a storage site that held Brew’s international goods that he traded in exchange for the lives of thousands of enslaved Africans. Sparks suggested how confusing and hard the travel for Africans across the Atlantic Ocean was because it had so many different directions, and scholars like James H. Sweet, Rebecca J, Scott, and Jean-Michael Hebrard were the ones who uncovered how complex the routes were.
Africans, mixed race people, and especially women that lived in Annamaboe were never clearly shown or described. Sparks was also unclear on why he saw the Rhode Island Rum Men as revolutionists in their thought in Annamaboe during the 1770s and 1780s. The other townspeople always thought of themselves as independent thinkers and operators. Many scholars still have trouble with incorporating Africa in the history of the Atlantic world completely, beyond just describing the slaves that were being traded. The way Sparks describes the history of Annamaboe portrays Africans as essential players in the Atlantic world as they are merchants, sailors, wives, and migrants.
Overall, Sparks did a great job describing things in detail. He elaborated and painted very clear pictures for all of the events throughout the book. Although it was a little hard to read personally, Sparks was able to get his important points across fairly easy. Any reader would be able to read this book and learn multiple things about the Atlantic salve trade, how it worked, and the many people that were involved with it.