Accumulation, wealth and belief in Asante history: I. To the close of the nineteenth century

Abstract

Opening ParagraphThe present article is intended as the first of two contributions to the economic and social– but above all to the intellectual– history of the West African forest kingdom of Asante or Ashanti (now located in the Republic of Ghana). Both papers will attempt to pull together and to situate in a ‘mentalist’ framework a number of recent and confessedly disparate research findings concerning a cluster of concepts, ideas and beliefs that, merely for the sake of brevity at this point, I will assign simply to the embracing ‘neutral’ rubric of general transformations in the ideology (or ideologies) of wealth. The first article will be concerned with developments in Asante society up to the close of the nineteenth century (defined here interpretatively rather than in strictly chronological terms); its successor will concentrate on a highly detailed examination of a sequence of crucially telling events in the early colonial period, and upon selected developments thereafter in the twentieth century. The articles are designed and intended to be read sequentially; the first, it is hoped, will assist in making sense of the significantly denser context (and more detailed content) of the second.