Mamluk Dynasties in Egypt

Mamluk Dynasties

The Mamluks ruled Egypt from the middle of the 13th century to 1517. The first 24 Mamluk sultans were called the Bahri (river) rulers. In 1382, they were followed by the Burji (tower) Mamluks, so called because they had been quartered in the towers of the Citadel fortress overlooking Cairo. The Mamluks, mostly of Turkish and Mongol origins, were slaves and professional soldiers.

They were purchased by other former slaves as young boys in the slave markets in Syria and Egypt and educated as a professional military caste. With the completion of their education they were freed and given full military regalia and land to pay for the upkeep of the equipment and horses.

The Mamluks were notoriously disputatious and constantly fought among themselves for succession to the throne. Since there was no principle of hereditary monarchy, any Mamluk could hope to become the ruler if he could overthrow the current sultan.

As a result, the average reign of a sultan was only six years. Mamluks married within the caste to the sisters and relatives of other Mamluks. Their society was based on a feudal hierarchy of allegiance of a vassal to a lord.


Recent converts to Islam, the Mamluks emphasized their rule as Muslims, even though many of them were not personally particularly devout. They allowed the exiled Abbasid caliph from Baghdad to reside in Cairo but successive caliphs exercised no real power.

The Mamluks encouraged metalworking, book binding, and textile industries. But Mamluk attempts to monopolize the trade on luxury goods, coupled with high taxes, discouraged many foreign and local merchants.

As great builders and patrons of the arts, the Mamluks encouraged scholars, including renowned historian Ibn Khaldun, to work in Cairo. Under the Mamluks, Cairo became a major intellectual and artistic center and grew into arguably the largest city in the region.

The Mamluks built hospitals, caravan-saries, public fountains, and massive mausoleums for their families. The mausoleum of Sultan Qaitbay (reigned 1468–96) was particularly impressive. Much of medieval Cairo dates from the Mamluk era.

Mamluk soldier

The Mamluk sultan Baybars (reigned 1260–77) drove the crusaders out of the eastern Mediterranean and repelled major invasions by the Mongols. A wily politician, Baybars also established alliances with potential enemies of Sicily, Seville, and the Turks.

The Black Death (plague) in 1340 reduced the population throughout Mamluk territories; in Cairo alone over 25 percent of the people perished. They were further weakened by Timurlane’s destruction in Syria. The expansion of Portuguese trading outposts along the African and Indian coasts led to mounting economic competition and as they lost control of trade from the east, the revenues from commerce declined.

In addition, constant disputes over succession weakened Mamluk authority and made them vulnerable to outside attacks. Their failure to forge a united front contributed to their defeat and the conquest of Egypt by the Ottoman Turks in 1517.

Luba-Lunda

Luba-Lunda

The Luba-Lunda states, in what is now the southeast of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Central Africa, were a network of kingdoms that lasted from the 15th to the 19th centuries c.e.

The Luba culture had emerged a millennium earlier, a civilization that soon began working in iron and dam construction. The local conditions—marshy wetlands that required drainage and provided a surplus of fish—encouraged large, stable communities and communal labor over individual self-sufficiency.

In time, trade relations and intermarriages between smaller communities led to a unified Luba state around the end of the 15th century c.e., by which time the Luba people were widely respected for the sophistication of their art and the quality of their ironwork, especially their axes and spears.

Luba kings ruled by right of descent from Kalala Ilunga, a mythic cultural pendekar who had invented much of Luba culture. The Luba king was the head of a large hierarchy of officials at the state and local levels, who paid him tribute he redistributed as rewards for loyalty.


Prominent in this hierarchy were the Bambudye, the “memory men” (though women were included) who maintained oral histories of the Luba kings and their deeds. As the Egyptian pharaohs and rulers in much of the ancient and antique world, Luba kings were revered as deities upon death, and these oral histories are comparable to Christian “saints’ lives” and other religious biographies.

The Luba system of divine kingship spread to other nearby cultures, notably including the Lunda, a strong military force in the region who increased their power by intermarrying their royal family with the Luba’s and colonizing large parts of central Africa before European colonization arrested their expansion.

The Luba kingdom itself extended its power and resources to include not only the copper mines of communities who had once been only trade partners, but New World goods from the Portuguese colonists (in exchange for ivory and slaves, among other commodities), leading to a centuries-long period of growth. The Lunda continued to self-govern, though were closely aligned with the Luba; they soon controlled much of the copper trade.

By the end of the 19th century, the Luba and Lunda states were in decline. Prosperity and intermarriage had encouraged infighting in periods when royal succession was not clear-cut; neighboring tribes had acquired firearms, a significant military advantage to which neither the Luba nor the militarily superior Lunda had any recourse except to acquire guns of their own, which they did by devoting more efforts to the slave trade.

But the slave trade itself was dwindling, and this proved not only disruptive to the economy and political balance, but also ultimately ineffective. Belgian colonists took control over the region, which King Leopold II called the Congo Free State.

The Luba rebelled several times, but fruitlessly, and many were sent into forced labor in the copper mines. The Luba and Lunda (and their other client tribes) persist today as ethnic groups, but their culture has been absorbed into that of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

French East India Company

French East India Company

The French East India Company was one of several companies created to promote Western European commercial interests in Asia, particularly in India, beginning in the 17th century.

Lured by Spanish and Portuguese traders’ tales of lucrative spice exports from the European and other Asian markets.

France entered the Asia trading arena significantly later than Great Britain, which founded the British East India Company in 1600, and the Netherlands, which founded the Dutch East India Company (Indonesia/ Batavia) in 1602. While France attempted to cultivate trade connections with Asia in the early 17th century as well, initial expeditions failed to secure any trading posts or settlements.


During the reign of King Louis XIV (1643–1715), however, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, minister of finance, reorganized earlier unsuccessful trade ventures into the French East India Company (Compagnie des Indes Orientales) in 1664.

Colbert sent an expedition that reached India in 1668 and built the first French factory (production center) in Surat on the western coast, and soon after another in Masulipatam on the eastern coast. In 1673, the company established its headquarters in Pondicherry, on the southeastern coast below Madras (now Chennai), and founded Chandannagar on the northeastern coast, north of Calcutta.

Madras and success rivaling that of Calcutta.

While France never became the dominant European authority in the region, for more than 50 years the French East India Company made great efforts to capitalize upon the expanding demand for textiles, dyes, and other goods that could be supplied by Indian merchants.

French accounts of the activities in port towns such as Surat detail the intricate steps involved in creating the fabrics, known collectively as indiennes (Indians). Particularly on the southeastern coast, Indian weaving villages generated thousands of bolts of textiles for eager European companies.

Most in demand were guinee cloths (cotton longcloth, usually 35 to 50 m in length), salempores (staple cotton cloth), and morees (cotton cloth of superior quality). Also coveted were the stunning toiles peintes (painted cloths) and toiles imprimés (printed cloths), as well as the magnificent silks and dyes.

The textiles were adored not only in Europe, but also in other parts of Asia; indeed, India had engaged in Asian textile trading centuries before Europeans arrived. In the Indonesian archipelago, China, and Japan, Indian cotton was popular for its lightweight, yet sturdy qualities.

In due course, the French, British, and Dutch acquired materials from India not only for their home countries, but for transport to Malacca or Java, for example, where they were traded for spices—cloves, nutmeg, mace, sugar, and pepper—crucial in Britain and Europe to preserve meats during harsh winters.

By the 18th century, the French had secured agreements to provide woven products tailored to Asian buyers’ interests: they had colored, patterned handkerchiefs specially woven for particular island markets, for example, which proved a successful entrepreneurial venture. Moreover, cloths of different types played a symbolic role in rites of passage and were sought after for use in birth, marriage, and death ceremonies, and bolts of cloth were commonly given as offerings or gifts.

A salient corollary to the French East India Company’s textile exchange is that its movements between Asia and Europe also supported the exchange of slaves. While the slave trade is often described as triangular, with the three corners Europe, Africa, and the Americas (the “New World”), trade between Europe and Asia also helped to sustain slavery.

French ships traded European goods in Asia, where they acquired cowry shells and Indian textiles highly valued in West Africa. Traders exchanged these goods in Africa for slaves, who were sent to France’s colonies in the Americas. “The circle was completed,” notes the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, “when sugar and other goods from the Americas were loaded on board and shipped back to France.”

In commencing trade with India, the French East India Company entered an already well established, complex economic system, an intricate network of production, negotiation, delivery, and distribution. Indian merchants operated large commercial fleets as well as prosperous shore-based businesses.

Inland weavers and merchants worked with overland freight deliverers and brokers, who worked with shipowners and exporters. All of these agents had to negotiate with local politicians and state officials for commercial privileges.

Regional and individual trading groups developed their own intra- and intercountry rules and practices as well. In order to gain access to the goods they desired, moreover, the French had to learn these rules and practices and successfully collaborate with indigenous envoys.

The French were able to develop manufacturing centers in various Indian states, but cooperating with Indian middlemen sometimes proved trying. In addition to conflicts between French traders and middlemen, clashes between traders and local authorities (and between middlemen and local authorities) often impeded successful business transactions.

The Dutch and the English had mastered the art of working with indigenous traders, shippers, and rulers much earlier than the French, and although their interactions were was not always seamless, they operated with that distinct advantage. In most of the towns and ports in which the French operated, there were also English and Dutch associates.

Where there was a French factory, there were likely to be English and Dutch factories as well. At the peak of the Indian trade, during which the demand for Indian goods exceeded the volume weavers and other artisans could produce, the presence of several East India companies, even in the same town, did not lead to serious rivalry.

As the three companies grew more competitive, however, the Dutch and particularly the English, better funded and more conversant in local business etiquette, were able to expand their factory outposts to larger industrial towns under their jurisdiction. These commercial strongholds became political enclaves, eventually enabling Great Britain to consolidate its power and control throughout India.

Despite its numerous settlements, after the death of Louis XIV, the French economy faltered and by 1719, the French East India Company was nearly bankrupt. The French East India Company resumed its independence in 1723.

While the British East India Company began as primarily a trading company, it increasingly became a governing power. As the British expanded not only economic but also political and colonial influence, tensions between Britain and France grew.

In 1742, Joseph Dupleix was appointed governor general of all French settlements in India and dedicated himself to exerting French power. He envisioned a French empire and to this end began to interfere in local Indian politics, playing local rulers against each other for his French benefit. In French port towns, officials equipped factories for defense.

The battle for supremacy led to a series of military conflicts between France and Britain, with triumph and defeat alternating between the two. In 1747, the French besieged and captured Madras. In 1751 and 1752, however, Englishman Robert Clive dislodged Dupleix’s forces in Arcot and Trichinopolgy, taking many French prisoners.

In 1754, the French government, anxious to make peace, recalled Dupleix to France. During the next half-century, British forces further colonized and forcefully subjugated much of India. While several Indian ports remained under French directive, Britain became the definitive Western authority of the Indian subcontinent.

Clive’s victory in the Battle of Plassey in 1757, which brought the state of Bengal under British control, is often cited as the landmark turning point of the British colonial heyday in India. Bereft of both authority and capital, Dupleix returned to the country for which he had so vigorously labored and died penniless in 1763.

Despite its earlier successes in both inter- and intra-continental trade, the French East India Company never regained its former eminence. Ultimately, King Louis XV suspended the enterprise; took over its forts, ships, and other properties; and in 1769, the French East India Company essentially dissolved.

Dutch in South Africa

Dutch in South Africa

The year 1652 marks the beginning of the Cape Colony, which started with the founding of Cape Town by Dutch commander Jan van Riebeeck, who worked for the Dutch East India Company, known in Dutch as the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC). The colony was situated halfway between the so-called Dutch East Indies and the Dutch West Indies.

The early 16th century saw the start of many European nations, such as Spain and Portugal, pursuing the sea route rather than the land route to India and establishing a colonial global empire outside continental Europe. From the late 16th century, the Netherlands was a preeminent naval power. The Dutch founded the VOC trading company as early as 1602.

They reigned supreme at sea, and dominated global commerce by the second half of the 17th century. This epoch coincides with the cultural flowering known as the Dutch golden age with such figures as the philosopher Baruch de Spinoza, the mathematician and physicist Christiaan Huygens, and the painter Johannes Vermeer.


In 1647, while exploring a route to India, a ship named Nieuwe Haerlem ran aground in Table Bay. The survivors, including possibly the captain, Leendert Janszen, with some crew remained onshore for about a year to look after the shipment.

Only 12 months later, a Dutch ship returned Janszen and his crew to Europe. Upon disembarking in Holland, Janszen wrote a feasibility report called Remonstrantie to the Council of Seventeen of the Dutch East India Company, in which he recommends the founding of a station where ships can resupply before sailing onto India.

Jan Anthoniszoon van Riebeeck was later appointed by the VOC to establish the station and eventually founded Cape Town in 1652, which soon opened South Africa to white settlement. The town’s purpose was “to provide fresh water, fruit, vegetables, and meat for passing ships en route to India as well as build a hospital for ill sailors.”

The development of Cape Town was slow at first, owing to crop failures and organizational chaos. Van Riebeeck advocated the introduction of more workers to save the colony and encouraged importation of slaves. Though the VOC did not send slaves for five years, captains on passing ships gave Van Riebeeck some in the meantime.

In 1654, the first Cape-based slave expedition was sent to Madagascar and Mozambique and three years later the first group of slaves was brought to the Cape from Angola and West Africa to meet the needs of the construction of a solid station.

Starting in 1655, Van Riebeeck’s exploration outside Cape Town eventually led to a war between the small colony and the local Khoikhoi (named Hottentots by the whites). The Khoikhoi were a pastoral people, inhabiting the coast of the Cape of Good Hope until the arrival of European colonizers. When Van Riebeeck left the Cape in 1662, the settlement had more than 100 colonists.

The Netherlands lost many of its colonial possessions to the British when the motherland surrendered to French conquest led by Napoleon, and more territory annexation to the French from 1795 to 1814. Subsequently Great Britain seized the colony in 1797 during the Fifth Anglo-Dutch War, and annexed it in 1805.

The Dutch colonists who remained after the British took over are now known as Afrikaners. Their language, Afrikaans, is derived from a creolized variety of a colonial dialect of Cape Dutch, influenced by both indigenous Khoikhoi peoples who speak the Khoisan language and the imported slave population.

Francis Drake - English Explorer

Francis Drake - English Explorer

Sir Francis Drake was an English mariner-adventurer, and sometime privateer, who circumnavigated the globe. Drake was born near Tavistock, Devon, England, not far from the important port of Plymouth. He came from a well-connected Protestant farming family, one of 12 children born to Edmund Drake.

At approximately age 13, Francis went to sea on a cargo bark and eventually became the master of the ship at age 20. These early seafaring years spent in the North Sea built his experience as a skillful sailor and navigator and gave him a sense of command. When he was 23 he joined his cousin Sir John Hawkins and for the first time voyaged to the New World. In association with Hawkins, he undertook the initial English slave-trading expeditions to the New World.

Drake discovered the lure of the Spanish Main with all its riches in silver, gold, and slaves. He disliked the Spanish from the onset, no doubt in part for their Catholicism, and in the 1560s, began his campaign against Spanish interests, appearing a pirate to some and a privateer to others. His raids demonstrated his bravado and determination, but almost cost him his life.

Drake’s most famous attack came in 1573 when he took the Spanish Silver Train at the port of Nombre de Dios. Finding the silver too heavy to carry, he took all the gold he could and returned to Plymouth on August 9, 1573, with 30 survivors. Unfortunately, Queen Elizabeth I had undertaken a temporary truce with Philip II of Spain, and Drake’s exploits were not officially celebrated.


In 1577, Queen Elizabeth, facing new Spanish hostilities, sent Drake with 150 men and five ships on an expedition against the Spanish interests on the Pacific coast of the Americas. Two ships had to be abandoned at Río de la Plata and the remaining three navigated the Straits of Magellan, making Drake the first Englishman to do so.

The voyage continued to be difficult; another ship was destroyed, and still another separated and returned to England. Drake sailed along the coast of South America alone in the Golden Hind, attacking Spanish interests, plundering Valparaíso, and seizing cargo as he moved. He continued along the coast of North America looking for a passage to the Atlantic, possibly as far north as the present state of Washington.

He stopped for supplies and repairs in San Francisco Bay and named the area New Albion. Drake now made the decision to cross the Pacific. He rounded the Cape of Good Hope and eventually returned on September 26, 1580, to Plymouth, laden with treasure. His exploits could not be denied even in the face of Spanish fury, and Queen Elizabeth knighted him.

War with Spain

Another war with Spain in 1585 put Drake back in his element. He took command of a fleet and launched assaults against Vigo in Spain, São Tiago in the Cape Verde Islands, and the New World ports of Santo Domingo and Cartagena, as well as St. Augustine in Florida.

In 1587, he “singed the King of Spain’s beard” with a preemptive and destructive raid on Cádiz, burning 31 ships and holding the town for three days in the process. This attack delayed the Spanish Armada sailing by a year.

Statue of Francis Drake

By the time the Spanish Armada sailed to England to invade in 1588, Drake was vice admiral in command of the English fleet. It was at this time that the famous Drake myth first appeared that had Drake enjoying a game of bowls on Plymouth Hoe as the Spanish fleet approached. Here he supposedly stated that he had plenty of time to finish the game before the Spanish arrived.

The English fleet pursued the Spanish through the channel. Drake caught the rich galleon Rosario and Admiral Pedro de Vales in the process. On July 29, 1588, Drake and Lord Howard of Effingham organized the fire ships that broke the Spanish formation, causing damage that forced the Spaniards into the open sea toward Calais. The following day, Drake and the rest of the English fleet defeated the Spanish at the Battle of Gravelines.

Drake’s tamat expedition against the Spanish occurred in 1595, supported by Hawkins. On this occasion, the Spanish inflicted defeat, particularly against Drake’s raids on San Juan, Puerto Rico. Hawkins died off Puerto Rico and Drake became ill from dysentery and died on January 28, 1596, while in the process of mounting a further attack on San Juan. Placed in a lead coffin, Drake was buried at sea with his crew burning the town of Puerto Bello as a dedication to his passing.

Drake’s life was one of adventure and determination, which helped enrich England with his plunder. He established claims to the New World and made England a recognized naval power.

British North America

British North America

Italian merchant John Cabot’s 1497 voyage from England west to what is now Newfoundland, Canada, was Europe’s first contact with North America since the Vikings. Cabot’s feat intensified English attention to the New World, yet for more than a hundred years, England would trail Spain and other European nations in exploring and exploiting the hemisphere. By 1750, however, Britain, having overcome a multitude of political, religious, and economic crises, was poised to dominate North America.

Early Undertakings

During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, two efforts to establish English colonies in America ended in failure and death. In 1582, Sir Humphrey Gilbert personally led a large crew across the Atlantic to reclaim Cabot’s Newfoundland for the queen. Its unfavorable climate and competition from Spanish and Portuguese fishermen dampened Gilbert’s hopes. On the voyage home less than a year later, Gilbert perished in an Azores storm.

Somewhat more successful was Sir Walter Raleigh, Gilbert’s half brother, and, for a time, a court favorite. Raleigh mounted a new colonial project in 1585, sending five ships bearing a hundred colonists to Roanoke Island, off the North Carolina coast.


When these settlers abandoned their mission in 1586, a second group was shipped to Roanoke, including the parents of Virginia Dare, who was, in 1587, the first English child born in North America. By 1590, a series of reprovisioning and rescue missions were reporting that the colony had disappeared, leaving generations of historians to argue whether Indian warfare, internal clashes, famine, disease, or some combination of these had wiped out Raleigh’s colonial ambitions.

As the 17th century dawned, England, despite its 1588 defeat of the Spanish Armada, followed by other triumphs over Spain, was still scarcely a presence in North America. At home, rapid population growth and policies that forced subsistence farmers off the land, combined with Reformation-fueled religious conflicts, were creating both crisis and opportunity.

British colonization in America emerged as a patchwork process that sent royal courtiers, London investors, religious dissident families, and the desperately poor across the Atlantic in search of profits and new hope.

Colonial “Plantation” Before 1660

Britain’s eventual dominion in eastern North America started unpromisingly in 1607 when Jamestown was founded in the region Raleigh had earlier named “Virginia” for Elizabeth I, the presumed “Virgin Queen.”

Disciplinary measures imposed by soldier-adventurer John Smith, followed by John Rolfe’s 1614 introduction of tobacco cultivation, eventually saved Jamestown, although major crises continued. Finding capable colonists in this wild and dangerous land remained difficult; Virginians turned to indentured servitude and eventually slavery for their labor needs.

As religious conflict deepened in the mother country, British dissidents of varying faiths sought refuge, influence, and livelihoods in North America. In 1632, Maryland was founded near Virginia by George Calvert, the first baron Baltimore, a recent convert to Catholicism.

He was granted a proprietary charter by King Charles I, who wife was Catholic. Together, Virginia and Maryland composed the Chesapeake region and survived with similar economies based on tobacco and coerced labor.

Meanwhile, in the Massachusetts Bay region other dissenting Englishmen deliberately sought exile from what they saw as a religiously and politically corrupt homeland. The Pilgrims, who made their way to Plymouth in 1620, and the Puritans, who began arriving in large numbers in 1630, sought to create a religious commonwealth that would serve as a “light to the world” and end the reign of the hated Stuart monarchy.

Shrewd Puritan investors managed to assemble a joint-stock company that won Crown authorization to claim New England land. By the 1640s, more than 20,000 English men and women were living there.

Although more socially stable and economically diversified than the Chesapeake, the growing Puritan religious state experienced problems that fractured Massachusetts Bay. John Winthrop’s leadership soon sparked internal religious dissent, led by Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, resulting their 1635–36 banishment to Rhode Island. Religious differences and a desire for more land led Thomas Hooker and others to relocate in 1636 to what became Connecticut.

With the end of the Cromwell Commonwealth and the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660, Britain hit its imperial stride in the New World. Between 1660 and 1732, all the colonies that would eventually break away in the American Revolution came into existence or were wrenched from European rivals. Additionally, the British made significant inroads in the Canadian Maritime regions east of New France.

In 1664, as part of a consolidation of royal power, Charles II sent a fleet of ships to seize lands along the Hudson River that had been claimed in 1609 by the Dutch West Indian Company and settled by Dutch colonists.

New Netherland, soon renamed New York, was the king’s gift to his brother James, duke of York, who became King James II in 1687. As sole proprietor of a territory that also included New Jersey and Delaware, the duke ruled autocratically, parceling out some of his holdings to favored friends.

Although he was also the duke’s personal friend, William Penn in 1681 became a very different kind of proprietor when, in payment of debts owed Penn’s late father, the king granted him an extensive holding named Pennsylvania.

To the dismay of family and his royal connections, Penn had become a member of the Society of Friends, known scornfully as “Quakers,” and his “Holy Experiment” made Pennsylvania a refuge for Friends and others fleeing religious persecution.

In 1663, Charles II rewarded eight men who had supported his return to the British throne by granting them a proprietorship that they promptly named Carolina, Latin for Charles. By 1670, Carolina was peopled mainly by Virginians, moving south for better or more expansive lands, and Englishmen from West Indian sugar plantations.

This territory became the first in North America to depend heavily on slave labor from its inception. Within 20 years, the colony was profiting from such warm-weather commodities as cotton, indigo, timber, cattle, and rice. By the early 1700s, African slaves outnumbered white settlers in this “Rice Kingdom.”

At its founding in 1732, Georgia was quite unlike other British colonies. Located between Carolina and Spanish-controlled Florida, it had a royal charter from King George II that allowed English general James Oglethorpe to fulfill his philanthropic dream of resettling poor British immigrants.

To assure the virtue of these worthy poor, this new colony’s overseers forbade alcoholic beverages and banned slavery. By 1750, however, Georgia had become a slaveholding society, much like neighboring Carolina.

Mix of Religion and Governance

Britain’s North American colonies began as a hodgepodge of religions, forms of governance, and economic systems. Clinging mainly to the continent’s eastern seaboard, colonists of different regions and settlement histories had little to do with one another.

As Britain began to consolidate its imperial power and goals in the period of political stability that followed the Glorious Revolution of 1688, its colonies experienced enormous population growth and new social and political challenges both within colonial society and in dealings with the “Mother Country.”

In 1651, during Cromwell’s regime, Parliament passed its first Navigation Act, designed to assure that growing colonial holdings, including those in North America, would produce wealth only for Britain’s benefit and not for its European rivals. Many more navigation acts would follow.

These mercantilist laws attempted to control both agricultural and manufactured goods. Many colonists, including plantation owners and New England shipbuilders, were enriched, but these laws also restricted colonial growth and trade initiatives.

As part of its aggressive commercial policy, Britain, by the 18th century, had become the world’s major trader in African slaves, surpassing the Dutch. Although the majority of slaves were destined for the sugar islands of the Caribbean, almost three hundred thousand slaves were “delivered” to the North American colonies between 1700 and the outbreak of the American Revolution.

Slave importation outstripped robust immigration of whites. No longer suffering a manpower glut, England discouraged emigration by its own people (with the exception of convicted criminals) but wooed colonists from many countries, including France, the Netherlands, and German principalities, often offering religious freedom and British citizenship.

As colonial populations increased and competed, issues of governance and home rule emerged. Many colonies had set up assemblies—Virginia’s House of Burgesses of 1619 was the first—to deal with local political problems.

These were by no means representative elected bodies, but were dominated by large landowners and other men of importance. Colonies that traced their origins to proprietors (like Calvert and the duke of York) tended to have more autocratic governments. The New England colonies generally allowed broader participation in political decision making.

Quaker Proprietor William Penn’s policies allowed more than half of Pennsylvania’s male population to have some political say. Royal governors, chosen by the king or Parliament, would often override local assemblies’ intentions. As colonial populations grew in the 1700s, so too did their thirst for effective political power.

Between the Glorious Revolution and the French and Indian War, assemblies in Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia, South Carolina, and Massachusetts often contested royal prerogatives and frequently had their way. Colonial legislators asserted their rights as British citizens to participate in lawmaking.

Britain’s imperial dominance in the 18th century was closely connected to its relationships with Native American tribal groups and its use of diplomacy, or more often war, to keep Spain and France from gaining ground in the Western Hemisphere.

Colonial policies were crafted with an eye to outflanking perceived threats from the these two powerful nations, and their native allies. Fearing that an alliance between Spain and France would imperil its colonial interests, Britain entered the 1701 War of the Spanish Succession.

In the subsequent Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, Britain gained control of much of eastern Canada and wrested from Spain its remaining colonial slave trade. More conflicts flared up in succeeding years as the three powers competed for trade preferences and territorial control. Flare-ups occurred regularly between British Carolina and Georgia, and neighboring Spanish Florida.

The “War of Jenkins’ Ear” began in 1739 when Spanish customs officials stopped suspected British smugglers and perhaps cut off the English captain’s ear. By 1744, Britain was fighting both Spain and France for North American and West Indian dominance in the War of the Austrian Succession.

Wars with Indian tribes were a constant from the earliest years of British incursion in North America. In 1622, Opechancanough, the chief who succeeded his brother, Powhatan, became convinced that whites had no intention of leaving.

He and his men attacked Jamestown, killing 300 settlers. In 1675, Wampanoag chief Metacom, known to New Englanders as King Philip, launched a major but ultimately unsuccessful effort to drive out the rapidly growing white population.

Twelve towns in Massachusetts were destroyed; a thousand whites and three thousand natives perished. At almost the same time, Virginians desperate for land were killing local Indians in an uprising known as Bacon’s Rebellion.

But European powers also made alliances with tribes, hoping to recruit their military aid against other tribes allied with their rivals. The powerful Iroquois Confederacy, centered in New York and Pennsylvania, had once helped the Dutch, but later became an important British ally during King Philip’s War. The Iroquois would help British and colonial forces attack the French and their set of Indian allies in the run-up to the 1754 French and Indian War.

By 1750, although not unchallenged, Britain’s North American empire was near its zenith. Britain’s mastery of the continent would soon be enhanced by its smashing victory in the coming war with France. Yet from that victory grew the seeds of colonial rebellion that would, before the end of the century, lose Britain a major portion of North America.

Conquest and Colonization of Brazil

Conquest and Colonization of Brazil

The Portuguese conquest of Brazil was a complex, prolonged, and partial process that many scholars argue was never fully realized. Lacking large cities, a centralized political structure, and a common language, the estimated 2 to 3 million precontact indigenous inhabitants of the Brazilian coast and interior were divided into an intricate patchwork of ethnolinguistic groups and clan-based tribes.

The principal coastal groups were Tupi-speaking peoples who had migrated into the area in the preceding centuries, displacing and absorbing existing groups. Seminomadic hunter-gatherers with intimate knowledge of the local environment, Tupi speakers were divided into numerous major branches and hundreds of autonomous bands, often in conflict with each other and other groups, and possessing great skill in the arts of war.

Their principal weapon, often used with deadly effect, was the bow and arrow. Like other ethnolinguistic groups in the Americas, many Tupi-speaking peoples practiced ritual cannibalism in the most general terms, a cultural-religious practice acknowledging the spiritual power of slain enemies.


The Portuguese used reports of ritual cannibalism to justify their invasion, slave raiding, and other excesses of violence, much as the Spanish had used the practice of ritual human sacrifice to justify their subjugation of the Aztecs in the conquest of Mexico.

The first European explorer to sight the Brazilian coast was Portuguese noble Pedro Álvares Cabral, in command of 13 ships headed around the southern tip of Africa to India, on April 22, 1500. Following a brief excursion on the beach, the expedition’s chronicler, Pêro Vaz de Caminha, produced the first written report on the land and its people.

Cabral sent one ship back to Portugal loaded with brazilwood, a red dyewood from which the later colony derived its name, and left behind two convicts to begin the process of mixing with the natives. The following year Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci sailed along Brazil’s southern coast. A number of French and Spanish expeditions followed.

These initial contacts with the natives were largely peaceful, though here as elsewhere they resulted in the spread of European diseases against which native peoples had no biological immunity. These diseases led to rapid population declines in many areas long before Europeans arrived.

The years 1500–30 saw the growth of the brazil-wood trade between Europeans and Brazil’s coastal peoples. Relations between rival French and Portuguese traders soon degenerated into a series of violent clashes, with the French ignoring the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, to which it was not a signatory.

In the early 1520s, the Portuguese established a garrisoned trading station at Pernambuco, where sugar cultivation was introduced in 1526. French-Portuguese hostilities along the coast intensified. In 1530, the Portuguese Crown responded by commissioning Martím Afonso de Sousa to begin the process of settlement and colonization, an expedition that in 1532 established the first permanent colony at São Vicente near modern São Paulo.

As conflicts with the French grew, in the mid-1530s King João III and his advisers devised the donatory system, which divided the coastland into 15 sections or donatories that extended along imaginary boundaries west into the interior, each to be ruled by a captain or hereditary lord.

Entrusting colonization to a handful of private individuals who would exercise full authority within their respective domains, the Crown hoped to secure its claims against its French rivals. Most donatories languished and failed, with São Vicente and Pernambuco seeing the greatest albeit limited success.

Important in this early phase of colonization were a small number of individuals who mixed with the natives and acted as cultural intermediaries between indigenous peoples and the Portuguese. Sailor Diogo Álvares ventured into the interior near Bahia in the early 1500s, married the daughter of the chief of the Tupinambá tribe, learned their language and culture, and changed his name to Caramurú.

By the 1530s, he had become a respected tribal chieftain and from this position of authority worked to facilitate the process of colonization. That the Bahia captaincy failed was due mainly to poor administration and the settlers’ failure to heed Caramurú’s counsel regarding their interactions with the natives.

Farther south, the settlement of São Paulo succeeded in large part by the efforts of Portuguese castaway João Ramalho, who had also married into a local tribe, the Goiana Tupinikin, and served as interpreter and intermediary.

Portuguese colonists generally mixed with the local inhabitants to a greater extent than was true of other European powers, thereby facilitating subsequent cultural and linguistic melding of different ethnic and racial groups.

Sugar Trade

As the brazilwood trade faded, sugar became the colony’s economic backbone. By the mid-1540s, two sugar-producing centers had emerged; one was around Pernambuco in the north, and the other was in São Vicente in the south.

By this time, competition with French, Spanish, and other rivals had sharpened, prompting the Portuguese Crown to intensify colonization efforts. Consequently, the Crown would play a major role in the colony’s economic development.

In 1549, Tomé de Sousa was appointed governor-general of Brazil at the head of a major expedition that included royal officials, artisans, soldiers, and Jesuit missionaries. Sousa established Salvador as the colony’s capital. To the south, the French colony at the Guanabara Bay threatened Portuguese control of the southern littoral.

In 1565–67, the Portuguese defeated and ousted the French colony and established the town São Sebastião de Rio de Janeiro. Sousa’s successor Mem de Sá (governor-general, 1558–74) consolidated royal control over these coastal population centers.

Indigenous resistance to colonization intensified, particularly in consequence of slave-raiding expeditions organized by planters in the rapidly growing sugar industry. Indian counterattacks nearly destroyed the settlements of Bahia, Espirito Santo, and Ilhéus, and killed Brazil’s first bishop, but could not stem the Portuguese tide.

The Jesuits played a key role in this early phase of colonization and in the centralization of royal authority. Though their numbers were never large (110 in all of Brazil in 1574), their economic, social, and cultural impact was huge.

Young and aggressive, the Jesuit order (founded in 1540) was instrumental in establishing the town of São Paulo in 1557, and in facilitating generally peaceful relations between Indians and colonists in the south.

Taking no vow of poverty, Jesuits made their missions (aldeas) self-supporting and profitable through farming, ranching, and related enterprises. They were also crucial to the colony’s educational life. For most of the colonial period, Jesuit colleges in all the major towns served as the colony’s principal schools.

By the mid-1500s, sugar planters considered that labor had become the colony’s principal economic bottleneck. Land was plentiful, but sugar production in their view required a steady and reliable supply of bound labor. Enslaving native peoples was their initial strategy for meeting these rising labor demands.

The period from 1540 to 1600 saw the most extensive use of Indian slave labor in Brazil’s burgeoning sugar industry. By the late 1500s, disease and native resistance combined to make Indian slavery unable to meet sugar growers’ labor demands, leading to conflicts among the Crown, sugar growers, and the Jesuits.

The Crown tended to advocate the integration of Indians into the economy as free wage laborers; sugar growers promoted slavery; and Jesuits worked toward the transformation of Indians into a kind of smallholding or peasant class. Whose vision predominated hinged on a host of local and regional variables.

The transition from Indian to African slave labor was gradual, though by the early 1600s African slave labor dominated the sugar industry. The first Africans came as servants and sailors, while the first large-scale importation of African slaves did not begin until the 1570s. By the 1580s, the labor force on the 66 sugar plantations of Pernambuco is estimated at two-thirds Indian and one-third African slaves.

In later decades, the proportion of African slaves grew, so that by 1600 Brazil’s slave labor force was predominantly African. Over the next 250 years, Brazil became the single largest recipient of African slaves in the Americas, especially the Northeast, the colony’s principal sugar zone.

Brazil’s European population remained overwhelmingly concentrated in coastal areas. All the major cities founded in the 1500s were ports, including Bahia, São Vicente, Olinda (1537), Santos (1545), Salvador (1549), Vitória (1551), and Rio de Janeiro (1565). The pattern continued well into the 1600s, especially in the north and along the lower reaches of the Amazon.

The Brazilian population remained heavily concentrated in coastal areas through the colonial period and after. As European coastal populations swelled, migrations of Indian peoples away from the coast intensified, producing a ripple effect throughout the interior.

In 1585, São Paulo colonists officially authorized slave-raiding expeditions, and for the next 150 years the bandeirantes hunted Indian slaves across much of Brazil in the service of Paulista sugar planters. From the 1550s on, a series of epidemics ravaged Indian populations, including those of 1552 around Bahia, 1554 around São Paulo, Espírito Santo in 1559, and continuing through the colonial period.

Further impelling the Portuguese Crown to consolidate its hold on the colony was the Dutch presence in the Northeast, from the 1620s until their expulsion in 1654. The discovery of gold in present-day Minas Gerais in the mid-1690s led to a gold rush in these regions from 1700 to 1760, while discovery of diamonds in the same region in the 1720s further propelled expansion into the interior.

Many escaped African slaves also escaped into the interior, sometimes forming Maroon societies of runaway slaves, called quilombos. The largest and most resilient, Palmares, endured through most of the 1600s. By 1700, the population of the colonized areas was an estimated 300,000, with 100,000 whites, 150,000 mostly African slaves, and 50,000 free blacks, Indians, and mixed-race groups.

Colonial Brazil’s first 250 years set in motion a series of patterns and processes that profoundly shaped the subsequent development of Brazilian society. Especially important in this regard were the formation of an export-oriented economy (most notably brazilwood, sugar, gold, and diamonds); stark divisions of race and class; highly unequal landownership; a substantial degree of racial and ethnic intermingling, particularly among the lower classes; the gradual movement of the frontier of settlement westward; the subordination of Indian and African peoples within a relatively rigid social hierarchy; and the existence of vast unconquered lands beyond the western and northern frontiers.

Aztecs (Mexica)

Aztecs (Mexica)

Because the Aztec elite continually retold their own history to accord with contemporaneous political and religious concerns, the origins of the Aztec Empire are shrouded in myth and legend.

The consensus view among scholars is that the Aztecs, or Mexica, were a Nahua-speaking nomadic hunting and gathering people who began migrating south from their mythical homeland, called Aztlán, located somewhere in Mexico’s northern deserts, beginning in the early 1100s.

One in a series of Nahua-speaking ethnic groups that migrated into the more fertile regions of Mexico’s Central Highlands after the fall of the Toltecs during the Postclassic period, the Mexica were considered barbarians and dubbed Chichimeca, or “lineage of the dog,” by the more advanced and sedentary groups already settled in the Basin of Mexico.


With its rich diversity of environmental resources, the Basin of Mexico, a region called Anáhuac in Nahuatl, had been a primary locus of sedentary agriculture and the development of advanced civilizations since the Preclassic period.

The Aztecs migrated into Anáhuac around the year 1250, where they lived a precarious existence for the next century, learning the sedentary lifeways of their more numerous and powerful neighbors.

According to Aztec legend, the site of their capital city was chosen around the year 1325, when one of their holy men saw fulfilled the prophecy of their principal god, Huitzilopochtli: an eagle perched on a cactus, in some versions devouring a snake. The site was a small outcropping of rocks on the western edge of the southern part of Lake Texcoco.

On this site the Aztecs began building their capital city, an island linked to the mainland by causeways, which they called Tenochtitlán (Place of the Cactus Fruit). At the time other city-states dominated the Basin of Mexico, most notably Tepaneca, Texcoco, and Tlacopán.

The island-city grew rapidly, as did Aztec military and political power. In 1428, under Itzcoatl (c. 1427–40), the Aztecs overthrew their Tepaneca overlords, asserted their independence, and became the “first among equals,” in a Triple Alliance with Texcoco and Tlacopán.

Bent on imperial expansion, the Mexica polity under Moctezuma I (c. 1440–69) combined wars of conquest with alliance-making to expand their domain, a process continued under the rulers Axayacatl (c. 1469–81), Tizoc (c. 1481–86), Ahuitzotl (c. 1486–1502), and Moctezuma II (c. 1502–20).

By the early 1500s, the Aztecs had created an expansive tributary empire that reached far beyond Anáhuac to embrace most of the settled territories to the east (to the Gulf of Mexico) and south (to the edge of the Maya domains), and whose influence was felt as far south as the Maya kingdoms of Guatemala. To the west, various Tarascan polities resisted Aztec efforts to subdue them, while closer to home, some retained their independence—most notably the Tlaxcalans.

Far from unitary or monolithic, the Aztec Empire was shot through with multiple fractures and divisions—of languages, ethnic groups, religions, kingdoms, city-states—largely a consequence the Mesoamerican political-cultural imperial tradition of leaving intact the ruling dynasties and bureaucratic infrastructure of dominated polities. An estimated 400 polities were subordinate and paid tribute to their Aztec overlords.

By this time, Tenochtitlán had become one of the largest and most densely populated cities in the world, covering nearly 14 square kilometers, with intricate systems of canals, footpaths, gardens, walls, paved streets, residential complexes, temples, and pyramids.

The city’s population probably reached 250,000 people. The planned city was divided into quarters, corresponding to the four cardinal directions, with a separate fifth quarter, Tlatelolco, serving as the city’s principal marketplace.

At the city’s core lay the sacred precinct, covering perhaps 90,000 square meters, filled with more than 80 imposing structures, dominated by the Great Pyramid (Templo Mayor), some 60 meters high, with its twin temples devoted to Huitzilopochtli (the god of the Sun and war) and Tlaloc (the god of rain).

Aztec Society

Aztec society was extremely hierarchical, with complex gradations of class and status extending from top to bottom, with each individual and family pegged into a specific social category.

After the household and nuclear family, the foundational social unit upon which social relations among the Mexica were built was the calpulli, an extended lineage group that corresponded to occupation, place of residence, and local governance—variously translated as “parish,” barrio, and “clan.” The vast majority of the inhabitants of Tenochtitlán and its subordinate polities were maceualli (commoners, plebians) engaged in agriculture, petty trade, or service.

A small minority, at most 10 percent of the populace, constituted the ruling class of top-echelon bureaucrats, dignitaries, warriors, and priests. Merchants, or pochteca, divided into merchant guilds, appear to have constituted a separate social class, as did warriors, priests, and craft workers.

The Aztec economy was based on a highly developed combination of agriculture, tribute, and trade, along with intensive exploitation of Lake Texcoco’s abundant lacustrine resources.

An ingenious agricultural device, the chinampas (sometimes erroneously called “floating gardens”), artificial islands built of woven mats of reeds and branches atop which was piled mud and organic matter dredged from the lake bottom, provided abundant maize, legumes, fruits, and vegetables. Trade and commerce occupied a central place in the Aztec economy. cacao beans were the principal form of money.

Religious concerns intruded into every aspect of Aztec daily life. The notion that the worlds of the sacred and the secular constituted distinct or separate realms did not exist. The Aztec corpus of religious beliefs and practices was dizzyingly complex, their pantheon of gods, deities, sacred beings, and divine entities reaching into the hundreds.

The most important deities were Huitzilopochtli (the Aztec’s most honored deity), Tlaloc, Quetzalcoatl (“Plumed Serpent”), and Tezcatlipoca (“Lord of the Here and Now,” “Smoking Mirror,” “He Whose Slave We Are”).

The latter was considered an especially capricious, devious, and dangerous god, one who derived great pleasure from laying waste to human ambition and pretension. Propitiation of these and many other gods constituted one of humanity’s principal tasks, for without adequate ritual and obeisance, they might well turn on their mortal underlings and wreak havoc on their lives and fortunes.

Unlike the Christian God of this same period, Aztec gods, like Mesoamerican deities generally, were not considered exclusive. It was common for groups and polities to adopt new gods, especially those of a dominant or conquered group, by incorporating them into an already well-populated pantheon.

Intimately tied to Aztec religion were Aztec conceptions of time. The Aztec solar calendar was divided into 18 “months” of 20 days each, with a five-day “barren” or “hollow” period at the end of each solar year—a time of foreboding and dread. Each month, in turn, was devoted to specific rituals and ceremonies paying homage to a particular god or combination of gods.

aztecs solar calendar

Thus, for instance, the “Feast of the Flaying of Men” took place on March 5–24, and included mass ritual human sacrifice in honor of Xipe Totec (the god of fertility and martial success), as well as gladiatorial contests and sacrifices, dancing, and feasting.

In addition to the solar calendar was the sacred or divinatory calendar, a pan-Mesoamerican phenomenon, composed of 260 days and divided into 20 units of 13 days each—all associated with particular gods and rituals. An Aztec “century” consisted of 52 solar years.

The end of each 52-year cycle was considered a period of great danger, for unless the Sun god Huitzilopochtli was adequately propitiated with human blood, the Sun would cease to rise and the world would come to an end.

Closely linked to these temporal cycles, to the propitiation of the gods, and to the expansion of the Aztec Empire generally were conceptions and practices of warfare, which occupied a central place in Aztec political culture and cosmology.

By the Postclassic period, Mesoamerica as a whole had developed a highly elaborate series of beliefs and practices concerning warfare. In general, its principal purpose was not to occupy territory or kill enemy combatants, though the latter in particular was not uncommon, but to subdue competing polities and capture enemy soldiers on the battlefield.

These captives would be sacrificed to the gods, in order to ensure the good harvests, the well-being of the empire, and the continuation of the world. Thus, the so-called Flowery Wars (“flower” being a metaphor for human blood) between the Aztecs and as-yet unconquered kingdoms such as Tlaxcala were conceived and undertaken principally as ritual events whose principal purpose was to capture victims for later sacrifice.

The accumulation of animosities that resulted from these ritual battles, along with these cultural beliefs concerning warfare and divine intervention in human affairs generally, proved crucial in the later conquest of Mexico.

Ashanti Kingdom in Africa

Ashanti yam ceremony in the Ashanti Kingdom

The Ashanti kingdom, or Asante, dominated much of the present-day state of Ghana during the period between the late 17th and early 20th centuries. It was ruled by an ethnic group called the Akan, which in turn was composed of up to 38 subgroups, such as the Bekiai, Adansi, Juabin, Kokofu, Kumasi, Mampon, Nsuta, Nkuwanta, Dadussi, Daniassi, Ofinsu, and Adjitai.

In the late 1500s, there were at least 30 small states, which corresponded to the subsections of the Akan people. By 1650, these groups had been reduced to nine, and by 1700, they united. Ultimately the groups formed a confederation headed by the chief of the Kunasi group.

The kingdom, formed by its legendary warrior Osei Tutu in 1691, was in fact a confederacy of both Akan and non-Akan people. The king’s symbol was the golden stool; equivalent to the throne, the stool became the symbol of kingship, so that a ruler was said to be enstooled or destooled.


The asantehene, or king, had authority when he was raised three times over the stool. Even after 1901, when Ashanti became a protectorate, and 1957, when it became part of the modern state of Ghana, the stool and the enstooling ceremony of the Asantehene were important ceremonies.

The Ashanti kingdom, although originally a confederacy, had three bases of power—administration, communications, and economics—and was located in what is now north Ghana. Osei Tutu took over the administration set up by Denkiyira, the former hegemon, and added to it.

Communities within 50 miles of the capital city of Kumasi were directly ruled by the asantehene. Under Osei Tutu and his successor, Osei Apoko (whose reign collectively lasted from approximately 1690 to 1750), the state expanded so much that by 1750, it encompassed about 100,000 square miles, with a population of 2 to 3 million.

All of present-day Ghana with the exception of areas directly on the coast with small adjacent areas in the contemporary states of Togo, Ivory Coast, and Burkino Faso were part of the Ashanti state.

In order to accommodate the new extent of the state, the administration divided itself into a metropolitan and a provincial area. The metropolitan area consisted of those towns within a 50-mile radius of Kumasi. The rulers of these towns were made up of the confederacy. Their only obligation was to pay annual tribute to Kumasi and troops in the event of war.

This practice was extended to newer members of the state. All towns elected a governing advisory council composed of powerful members of the community. The towns were considered part of the Kumasi sphere, as they paid taxes that supported a steady army in the early 20th century. After a revolt of a military chieftain in 1748, a palace guard was organized.

The rulers of the metropolitan spheres were members of the royal Oyoko clan and served on the royal council and had autonomy in nonfiscal and military matters. The Council for the Asantehene had gained substantial power; it occasionally destooled an incompetent ruler and formally helped to choose the new asantehene.

Bureaucratic Control

The provincial aspect of administration was subject to increased centralization as the centuries progressed. Outlying Akan districts did not participate in the royal selection process but were forced to pay taxes. By 1800, they were also forced to pay tribute.

They were subject to increasing bureaucratic control such as a state agency that controlled all internal and external trade. The non-Akan areas controlled until the mid-19th century also sent thousands of slaves annually to Kumasi.

The effectiveness of the Ashanti state relied on communication processes. The complex bureaucracy served as a conduit throughout the state. In addition both taxes and tribute were used to establish a well-maintained army throughout the century. Most famously were the talking drums.

Since the national language of Ashanti, called Twi, was polytonal, any military commander or direktur could send out messages by matching syllables to the tones of the drum in a fashion similar to Morse code.

Economics

The mainspring of the confederation was economic. It had fertile soil, forests, and mineral resources, most notably gold. The future state of Ashanti had two ecological zones. In the southern forest belt there were forests and fertile soil.

Original subsistence crops included yams, onions, and maize and, in the 19th century as farming became commercial, cola nuts and cocoa. In the northern savanna belt, there were yams and Guinea corn. The state was advantageously located for the importation of slaves from both the north and the west.

In this period, beginning in the 15th and 16th centuries and lasting until the 1830s when slavery was abolished, the Ashanti still used slave labor to plant more crops such as plantains, yams, rice, and new crops such as maize and cassava brought from the Americas. This led to an increase in population and a movement of the Akan peoples to the forest zones.

The use of slave labor was involved in its most important mineral product, gold. Akan enterprise utilized the labor of slaves for both trading with Europeans (Portuguese, Dutch, English) and in the state grassland belts first in clearing new land and then for the development of deep-level mining and placer mining.

The slave trade for gold brought more slaves to produce more gold, and slaves were also traded for firearms. The desire to exert control over gold production and the new farming communities in the forest helped facilitate state functions.

The desire to control access to labor pushed the Ashanti state in its attempt to control the coast inhabited by its Fanti peoples. The attempt to conquer the Fanti led to disputes and battles with the British, who had taken over the Gold Coast by 1815.

Earlier the Ashanti had played the Dutch and Portuguese against the British. However hostilities after 1800 erupted for control of its coast. After the Ashanti were able initially to defeat the British in 1807 and in 1824, they suffered setbacks and accepted the Prah River as a border.

Thereafter peace reigned for over 40 years. In 1872, a long-simmering dispute on the control of El Mina (the great Portuguese and Dutch post) saw a renewal of hostilities. After early Ashanti success, the British occupied Kumasi in 1874 until peace was concluded.

In the late 19th century, the state began a rapid decline. Other parts of the state broke away so that by 1900, the state had dwindled to approximately 25,000 square miles and a quarter of a million people. The British began to interfere in events in Ashanti.

In 1896, they deposed the asantehene and in 1900, a British demand for the golden stool resulted in an uprising that was put down in 1901, after which Ashanti was a protectorate. Incredibly, the golden stool was never surrendered and was restored to the nation after being “accidentally” found in 1921. In 1926, the asantehene was restored to the stool, and in 1935, its ceremonial role in Ashanti was formally restored.

During the colonial period, its population increased more than fourfold. The Ashanti peoples engaged in cocoa growing while also actively producing crafts such as weaving, wood carving, ceramics, and pottery making. The bronze and brass artifacts produced by the lostwax process became prominently displayed in museums throughout the globe. Since 1935, the kingdom, now part of Ghana, has been organized into 21 districts.

Throughout its golden age, the Ashanti state demonstrated impressive flexibility, often at the expense of neighbors whom it enslaved and whose tribute it exacted. It continued to increase production in the gold mines and to migrate and clear forest for agricultural production. It utilized the slave trade to increase its military might and diplomacy to key European allies.

After slavery was abolished, it found a new economic outlet in cola nuts, and in the 20th century, the production of cocoa, Ghana’s biggest export. Even in independent Ghana, the Ashanti kingdom still maintains a clear existence and the Ashanti people have retained their cultural identity.