Randy J. Sparks is Professor of History at Tulane University.
Where the Negroes Are Masters is a pathfinding work that surely
will have great influence on our understanding of ‘the largest
forced migration in history.’ Sparks is a diligent researcher who
shows the many ways in which the Fante leadership entrenched its
position in the trade… An interesting and important book.
*Washington Post*
Carefully researched, completely engaging… Sparks recounts a story
that is so telling, and so profound in its implications, that it
should be explored in every school in the land—and used as a
touchstone for a new way of describing the birth of America.
*School Library Journal*
Africans entered the trans-Atlantic slave trade as more than cargo;
many operated as wily merchants integral to the far-reaching
Atlantic commerce that began with European contact and the search
for gold in the 1430s and shifted to traffic in humans… Unveiling
African merchant elites functioning as cultural brokers, literate
in English and traveled in Europe and the Americas, and operating
as major forces responding to 18th-century market opportunities,
Sparks expands our understanding of the Atlantic connections of
West Africa’s coastal trading communities.
*Library Journal (starred review)*
This persuasive, well-researched study of the 18th-century Atlantic
slave trade takes the unique approach of examining ‘the African
merchant elites who facilitated that trade,’ who, according to
Tulane University history professor Sparks, ‘were as essential to
the Atlantic economy as the merchants of Liverpool, Nantes, or
Middleburg.’ That premise may be somewhat surprising, if not
outright provocative, but he delivers proof.
*Publishers Weekly*
If you want to know how the slave trade worked on Africa’s west
coast, there is no better starting point than Randy Sparks’s
brilliant urban biography of the Gold Coast port of Annamaboe. It
elevates our understanding of the Atlantic in the age of the
transatlantic slave trade to new heights.
*Ira Berlin, author of Many Thousands Gone: The First Two
Centuries of Slavery in North America*
Randy Sparks takes what might appear to be a minor port on the Gold
Coast and gives us a history of the whole Atlantic Basin, through
the history of one carefully defined branch of the slave trade. He
shows us how multiple actors from different cultures speaking a
number of different languages managed to cooperate, argue, compete,
and finally succeed in knitting a transatlantic community together.
This is a masterpiece of turning micro-history, with its fine
detail, into mega-history of the first magnitude.
*John Thornton, author of A Cultural History of the Atlantic
World, 1250–1820*
This well-written and altogether gripping story is Atlantic history
at its best. Randy Sparks demonstrates the complexity of
enslavement itself, examining the multiple processes by which
persons came to be construed as property, both on the coast of
Africa and in the Atlantic trade.
*Rebecca J. Scott, coauthor of Freedom Papers: An Atlantic
Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation*
Randy Sparks’s well-illustrated study of this Gold Coast port
expands and deepens our understanding of African middlemen’s
importance in the Atlantic economy before 1800 and of the
operations of the transatlantic slave trade.
*David Northrup, author of Africa’s Discovery of Europe,
1450–1850*
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