Content area
Full Text
Ray A. Kea A Cultural and Social History of Ghana from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century: The Gold Coast in the Age of Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 2 vols. Lewiston ny: Edwin Mellon Press, 2012. viii + 686 pp. (Cloth us$ 199.95)
This welcome capstone to the career of Ray Kea, now emeritus, reads as an ambitious extension of his prior work on the "Gold Coast" of West Africa that later became incorporated into the twentieth-century nation-state of Ghana (as indicated through renaming in the book's title and subtitle). Those who will appreciate this new offering most are those who know Kea's oeuvre best because they will recognize how much here is new, and how it challenges them to think differently about otherwise familiar scholarly terrain.
This is a big book-so big in fact that its approximately 700 pages are produced in two separate volumes. There is much to behold. Its chronological and geographical reaches are similarly expansive, extending from a fifteenth-century "Golden Age" of state building, to later encounters between locals and overseas strangers in West Africa, through local slaveries and then the export of captives in the eighteenth century especially, and finally to the rebellions that brought about the eventual abolition of bondage in Danish colonies in the Atlantic world in the nineteenth century.
To...