Connecting Things: Trading Companies and Diplomatic Gift-Giving on the Gold and Slave Coasts in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Abstract

Gift-giving was an important feature of cross-cultural diplomacy in the complex political landscape of the early modern Gold and Slave coasts. The article examines gift-giving practices that European trading companies used toward African rulers and elites, relating them to European courtly diplomacy. Tracing the repertoire of gift objects, it argues that the very function ascribed to gifts required learning about another’s rules, values, habits, or tastes. In consequence, a repertoire of gifts peculiar to the contact zone was established, consisting not least of objects adapted into local practices and production. These processes of adaptation were influenced by the materiality of the objects.