Guinea Company Research Articles

Changing Triangular Relationships: A Historical Analysis of Labour Relations at a Chinese Mine in Papua New Guinea

This paper contributes to the literature on the expansion of Chinese multinational corporations (CMCs) in Papua New Guinea (PNG) by comparing the operation of a Chinese mine to that of the German New Guinea Company. I start by looking at the two economic positions (helper and merchant) performed by early Chinese immigrants to New Guinea during the colonial era and the host hostility they encountered. 1 Then, a case study of a Chinese mining company in postcolonial PNG illustrates how local employees learned to negotiate with Chinese management through unionization instead of striking. In the meantime, Chinese personnel became subject to PNG industrial regulations based on Australian standards rather than operating as a modernizing agent to educate local workers. 2 These findings suggest that, despite specific new Chinese communities becoming investors, they must dedicate resources towards comprehending local customs and legislation, given the enhanced agency of local actors.

From Scarlet to Gold

Abstract The history of the English Guinea Company (1618–1657) – the circumstances of its establishment in particular – has not drawn much attention from scholars during the last seventy years. Thus, this article focuses on the process leading to the foundation and chartering of the Guinea Company in November 1618, as well as on the company’s role in the history of English activity in West Africa. Using a re-discovered Chancery court case, it argues that the establishment of the company was the outcome of the convergence of two separate commercial trajectories: the development of the camwood trade in the 1610s and the gold-hunting trend that characterized the early stages of England’s overseas expansion process. This outcome, it is further argued, was a turning point in the history of English activity in West Africa, creating the platform that enabled the English to emerge as prominent players in the region in the 1670s.

They ‘submitted themselves with their lands to his majesty … for ever and always’: natural law and Danish colonialism on the eighteenth-century Guinea Coast II

ABSTRACT Drawing on archival material from the Danish Guinea Company and central administration, this article discusses the uses of the discourse of the law of nature and nations in the Danish-Dutch war of 1776–1778 on the Guinea Coast and its aftermath. It shows how Danish and Dutch administrators drew on the law of nature and nations to justify their competing claims in the war, which in turn hinged on claims to territorial and sovereign rights on the coast, grounded on occupation, conquest, and subjection by treaty. It also shows how the discourse was further used to reconceptualise African political relations in the service of these claims in different ways by the Danish and the Dutch. Further, an ability to use natural jurisprudential discourse was important not just in pursuing present claims, but also in formulating evidence that could be used in later controversies. Finally, the article argues that the use of natural jurisprudential discourse on the coast encouraged European governments, especially the Danish, to pursue their territorial claims there as a basis for further colonisation.

‘Against the Law of God, of nature and the secular world’: conceptions of sovereignty in early colonial St. Thomas, 1672-1680

ABSTRACT This article examines conceptions of sovereignty in the Danish Caribbean colony of St. Thomas between 1672 and 1680. It focuses on the colony’s first governor, Jørgen Iversen, and his struggles to govern the colony on behalf of Denmark’s absolutist monarchy and the Danish West India and Guinea Company. Using insights from recent studies of sovereignty and power in colonial societies, the article explores how Iversen organized the colony’s legal system as a means of creating legitimate rule and as a way of transferring the sovereignty of the Danish monarch across the Atlantic. By demonstrating that colonization was a profoundly political project, the article challenges existing historiographical interpretations of early colonial rule that have mainly focused on the economics of Danish Atlantic expansion and the allegedly chaotic and unruly nature of St. Thomas’s colonial society. More generally, the article provides new insights into the study of sovereignty and authority in the formation of Caribbean colonial societies.

Mutiny in the Danish Atlantic World: Convicts, sailors, and a dissonant empire by Johan Heinsen

Reviewed by: Mutiny in the Danish Atlantic World: Convicts, sailors, and a dissonant empire by Johan Heinsen Marcus Rediker Mutiny in the Danish Atlantic World: Convicts, sailors, and a dissonant empire By Johan Heinsen. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. On the evening of 19 January 1683 a group of sailors and convicts huddled up in quiet, urgent conversation on the dark lower deck of the Havmanden, a vessel owned by the Danish West India and Guinea Company, bound for the small island colony of St. Thomas in the Caribbean. For weeks the men had been exchanging stories about the imperious captain of the ship, the Dutchman Jan Blom, and the haughty Jørgan Iversen, once the iron-fisted governor of St. Thomas, now on his way to resume the post. Blom was known for his lavish dinners in the captain’s cabin, which sickened the growling stomachs of those down below. Iversen was denounced as a “soul-seller” who profited off the bodies of the poor. Tensions on the ship had reached a breaking point and the time for decisive action had arrived. The following day the mutineers smashed open Blom’s cabin door and shot him as he tried to escape, threw Iversen overboard, and killed six others loyal to their power. A motley crew of Danish, Norwegian, Dutch, German, Irish and English sailors and convicts took charge of the ship and imagined a different social order of the ship and a new destiny for themselves as pirates. After an anarchic voyage of two and a half months, during which another uprising exploded from the lower deck, the mutineers wrecked the Havmanden on the coast of Sweden in late March 1683. Danish authorities captured the rebels and carried them back to Copenhagen, where, four months later, they tortured and executed nine of them before a crowd of thousands. The mutineers’ grand plan failed but their actions nonetheless had huge consequences, explains Johan Heinsen in this excellent history from below: their revolt proved to be a turning point in the history of empire. Struggle from below must now be reckoned a major cause of the relative failure of Danish colonialism. Drawing upon a deep and rich body of sources, Heinsen explores this mutiny and its consequences in a complex, sophisticated way. The first half of the book, “The Noises of Mutiny,” probes the process of mutiny and its genesis in storytelling. The second half, “A Social History of Dissonance,” situates the mutiny in a “wider context of lower class traditions and struggles” among sailors and convicts (18). Heinsen combines the methods of social history (a la Natalie Zemon Davis), cultural anthropology (Victor Turner’s “ritual process”), microhistory (Carlo Ginzburg) and even a kind of sociolinguistics (reminiscent of Dell Hymes). He then anchors all in a larger framework most fully realized by the great Herman Melville, who demonstrated through his novels that a tall ship was an entire social world unto itself. Heinsen succeeds in writing a history of those on the lower deck Danish authorities described, accurately for once, as a “multitude of indomitable people” (125). The history is dissonant because the harsh, clashing sounds of the struggle aboard the Havmanden were irreconcilable in their own day and remain so in ours. The most creative part of Heinsen’s approach is his analysis of the soundscape of the ship. Heinsen “listens” to his archival sources with extraordinary intensity, using what he calls “slow meditation” over the traces of “broken oaths, unruly tongues and disobedient utterances” (177, 14). He regards stories as “dark matter” that affects everything nearby even when it cannot be directly observed (14). He detects and amplifies reverberations in the sources to recover the lost voices of sailors and convicts who told stories, spread rumors, bonded with each other and changed the course of history. This is not abstract, idealist discourse analysis but rather a materialist accounting of speech as action, in conflict, creating and subverting the “aural order” of the ship (81). Heinsen has conceptualized and reconstructed the hidden history of sonic class struggle in genuinely creative ways. Written with grace and power, Mutiny in the Danish Atlantic World deserves a wide readership among all scholars and readers...

Sovereignty, Mastery, and Law in the Danish West Indies, 1672–1733

AbstractIn the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, officers of the Danish West India and Guinea Company struggled to balance the sovereignty of the company with the mastery of St. Thomas’ and St. John's slave owners. This struggle was central to the making of the laws that controlled enslaved Africans and their descendants. Slave laws described slave crime and punishment, yet they also contained descriptions of the political entities that had the power to represent and execute the law. Succeeding governors of St. Thomas and St. John set out to align claims about state sovereignty with masters’ prerogatives, and this balancing act shaped the substance of slave law in the Danish West Indies. Indeed, the slave laws pronounced by and the legal thinking engaged in by island governors suggest that sovereignty was never a stable state of affairs in the Danish West Indies. It was always open to renegotiation as governors, with varying degrees of loyalty to the company and at times with questionable capability, strove to determine what sovereignty ought to look like in a time of slavery.

In Service to a Danish King: Comparing the Material Culture of Royal Enslaved Afro-Caribbeans and Danish Soldiers at the Christiansted National Historic Site

ABSTRACTNew archaeological research inside the Christiansted National Historic Site in St. Croix, United States Virgin Islands, has uncovered a wealth of cultural resources around the Danish West India and Guinea Company Warehouse that have lasting implications for the largely Afro-Caribbean descendent Crucian community living in St. Croix today. Following a stump removal, exposing the remains of a Danish military stock warehouse containing 3,152 artifacts, two excavations targeting the dwelling spaces of royal enslaved Afro-Caribbeans recovered over 4,000 artifacts within the same warehouse structure. This new research brings into focus the daily lives of the enslaved Afro-Caribbean peoples residing within the walls of the Danish West India and Guinea Company Warehouse in service to the King of Denmark. The project also brings attention to the lives of the Danish officers who carried out their operations in the same space. This article explores the relationship between these two groups.

Dissonance in the Danish Atlantic: speech, violence and mutiny, 1672–1683

ABSTRACTIn 1683 the fragile Danish Atlantic was shaken by a mutiny orchestrated by a coalition of common sailors and convicts. On the way to St. Thomas in the Caribbean, they seized the ship, Havmanden, and killed their superiors. Among the dead was the newly appointed governor of St. Thomas, Jørgen Iversen. He was a veteran of Atlantic colonization and had been the governor of the Caribbean colony from its foundation in 1672 to 1680. In his absence the colony had devolved into a pirate's nest, and the Danish West India and Guinea Company hoped that his experience and authority could once again bring their small empire back on track. Instead, the mutiny further weakened their grasp on their Caribbean colony. In the night before the mutiny, the governor had attempted to quell the simmering disgruntlements on the ship by promising the convicts that he would treat them well when they reached the colony. However, they heard his promise as a threat. This article explores this discrepancy and places it in the context of circulating stories and rumours of violence, exploitation and death in the Caribbean. In exploring the contours of such storytelling felt only indirectly in the fragmented archival trail, this genealogy of a single speech act, in turn, raises questions about the role of speech in the making and unmaking of seventeenth-century Atlantic empires.

Recasting the New World: Britain and the Treaties of 1713 and 1763

Recasting the New World:Britain and the Treaties of 1713 and 1763 Jeremy Black (bio) In the press of forthcoming anniversaries, notably of the beginning of the First World War, Magna Carta, and Waterloo, those of the Peace of Utrecht (1713) and the Peace of Paris (1763) might seem of limited consequence. Compared to the immediacy of the photography and newsreels of 1914, these 18th-century treaties are apparently resonant of a dead age. Yet both the treaties and the wars they concluded were important in helping make the world we live in now. This is particularly so because the wars and treaties ensured that British political culture, rather than its French counterpart, would become the dominant model in North America. Of the two, the Peace of Paris was the most significant, although that of Utrecht was an important anticipation. Utrecht, which brought to an end Britain's participation in the War of the Spanish Succession, secured Britain wide-ranging gains, including Gibraltar and Minorca, captured from Spain in 1704 and 1708, respectively. Utrecht also left Britain with the asiento, the right to supply slaves to the Spanish Empire, and with a limited, although potentially profitable, right to trade there. This right was exercised by the South Sea Company, and the extravagant hopes it gave rise to helped launch the vast speculative bubble in shares in the company that famously burst in 1720. Philip V of Spain, the grandson of Louis XIV of France and the French candidate for the Spanish succession, had earlier granted the asiento to the French Guinea Company in 1701. Its acquisition by Britain was significant in Britain's competition with France for the leading position in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and for the ability to profit from the economic opportunities of Latin America. Utrecht also increased the British stake in North America with the gain of Nova Scotia and the acceptance of the British position on Newfoundland and around Hudson's Bay. The peace settlement registered the fate of the war. In 1710 a force of New England militia supported by British units had captured Port Royal, the main French position in Nova Scotia, and had left a garrison in what was renamed Annapolis Royal in honor of Queen Anne. In contrast, the major amphibious expedition sent to capture Québec in 1711 failed as a result of a nighttime error in navigation that caused the loss of eight ships and nearly 900 men on rocks in the St. Lawrence estuary. France's defenses in North America were weakened as a result of the loss of Nova Scotia. There was still, however, a French presence that provided opportunities to challenge the British. The French settlers in Click for larger view View full resolution Prime Minister George Grenville holds "debt" and "savings" in the balance. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZ62-45399]. Nova Scotia, the Acadians, maintained a French interest in the colony. Furthermore, in Newfoundland the French retained seasonal shore rights that supported their continued presence in the valuable Newfoundland cod fishery, a presence that provided an important source of sailors for the French navy. The Utrecht settlement scarcely made Britain's victory over France in North America during the Seven Years' War (1756-63) inevitable, but it strengthened the process by which British and French imperialism there were diverging. Louis XIV's willingness to cede colonial claims to Britain in 1713 was an aspect of his focus on dynastic and European interests that contrasted markedly with the oceanic and economic commitment of Britain's Tory ministry. With limited population growth and little state support, France's colonies were heavily dependent on trade relations with Native Americans, linking France's transoceanic networks to the river systems that channelled exchange in the interior of the continent. As a result, French imperialism was very much inserted into the dynamics of Native American development. The same was also true of the British colonies, but their rapid demographic growth and the related development of an agrarian society created a different pattern from one that depended on links with Native Americans. This contrast was to be important in the development of an independent America...

The First Scottish Guinea Company, 1634–9

The First Scottish Guinea Company, 1634–9

Chinese in Rabaul —1921 to 1942:Normal practices, or containing the yellow Peril?∗

Abstract Chinese men were brought to New Guinea initially by the German New Guinea Company as labourers on plantations. The climate, harsh working conditions and disease reduced their numbers drastically. The sporadic flow of labourers soon stopped, but Chinese were brought to New Guinea by the Company and — later — by the German Administration as artisans and domestic servants. Most returned to China but some remained to become small traders. Hard work and determination to succeed saw many become a threat to European, enterprises. The German and subsequently Australian Administrations were urged to restrict their entry and control their enterprises. At the same time European attitudes prevalent in Southeast Asian colonies were transplanted to New Guinea. Chinese were seen as desirable, if not essential, but were kept at a social level between local villagers and the colonisers. Their status was clearly shown when European, but not Chinese, women and children were evacuated at the threat of Japanese invas...

The Slave Ship Fredensborg: History, Shipwreck, and Find

During a violent storm the Danish-Norwegian frigate Fredensborg was wrecked on 1 December 1768, at Tromøy, an island outside Arendal in southern Norway. The long journey in the triangular route was nearly completed when the crew of 29 men, three passengers, and two slaves managed to save their lives under very dramatic conditions. The Captain, Johan Frantzen Ferents, and the Supercargo, Christian Hoffman, saved the ship's logbook and other journals. These, together with other documents which are in the national archives in Denmark and Norway, make it possible for us to follow the course of the frigate from day to day, both during the journey and after the wreck.The Fredensborg was built in 1752-53 by the Danish West India-Guinea Company in Copenhagen. On its first journey in the triangular trade, and during five subsequent journeys to the West Indies, it sailed under the name of Cron Prins Christian. In 1765, when the Guinea Company replaced the West India-Guinea Company, taking over the forts on the Gold Coast and all trading rights and ships, the name was changed to Fredensborg, after the Danish-Norwegian fort at Ningo. At that time Denmark-Norway owned the islands of St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix in the West Indies and their need for slaves was growing.They weighed anchor in Copenhagen on 24 June 1767 with 40 men on board, and anchored in the road at their main fort Christiansborg on the Gold Coast 100 days later, on 1 October 1767. Because of an inadequate supply of slaves, the Fredensborg remained in the road for 205 days. This had a very adverse effect on the health of the crew, with 11 deaths, including that of the Captain, Espen Kiønig. One of the deceased had drowned.

An Early Map and the Cadastral Survey of St. Croix, Danish West Indies 1734-41 / A Cartographic Cul-de-sac

In 1733, the Danish West India and Guinea Company, in which the upper levels of Danish politics and commerce were involved, purchased the Caribbean island of St. Croix. The Company was for a surprising time unable to marshall the cartographic and organizational expertise and resources needed to make satisfactory maps of its important new colonial acquisition. One result was a drastic discrepancy between the actual area of the island and calculated returns from land revenues. The communication between colony and metropolis reached a cartographic impasse when the Danish colonial authorities ordered the superimposition of the emerging cadastral pattern on a quite materially inaccurate 17th-century base map - an impossible undertaking.

English Traders on the Guinea Coast, 1657–1668: An Analysis of the East India Company Archive

English trade with Guinea in west Africa was regulated during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries by royal letters patent. In 1631 Charles I issued a patent which entitled the Guinea Company, headed by Sir Nicholas Crispe, to the monopoly of trade from Cape Blanco to the Cape of Good Hope for a period of thirty-one years. The Guinea Company continued to operate during the Interregnum in spite of increased competition both from freelance merchants, known as interlopers, and from rival European powers. The Council of State in 1651 decided to allow the monopoly to run for a further fourteen years, but restricted the Company to an area lying between two points set twenty leagues to the north of Cormantine, its headquarters in Guinea, and twenty leagues south of the fort at Sierra Leone, leaving the remainder of the coast open to all English traders.The East India Company was eager to gain a part in the Guinea trade because ships calling there on the way to India could exchange a cargo of European manufactured goods for a consignment of gold and ivory which was used to sustain operations at the factories in India. In this way the Company had less need to export large quantities of bullion from England to India, a practice which was both heavily criticized and formally restricted before 1660. In 1649 the East India Company reached an agreement with the Assada adventurers that the Guinea and East India trades should be united, but decided that this scheme could not be effected immediately.

An Inventory of Microfilms of Selected Danish Archives (Rigsarkvet-Københaven) Concerning West Africa

The following inventory of eighty-five reels of microfilm represents a selection of documents which relate to West Africa from the State Archives of Denmark. The documents date from 1624 to 1823, though the majority of them originated in the eighteenth century. They were taken from three major classes of records in the Rigsarkivet in Copenhagen: the West India and Guinea Company (Vestindiskguineisk Kompagni), the Guinea Company (Guineisk Kompagni), and the Various Records from Guinea (Diverse arkivalier fra Guinea). The West India and Guinea Company and the Guinea Company (or, more specifically, the Royal Chartered Danish Guinea Trading Company) were two of the most important companies involved in the West African trade in the eighteenth century. However, there was another, the Royal Danish Baltic-Guinea Company, which received a charter in 1779. Unfortunately, its records have not survived. Most of the documents in this collection are written in Danish, but some are in Dutch since many of the Danish Guinea Company's employees were Dutch.The West India and Guinea Company (1671-1755) archives consist of three groups of material: company records in Copenhagen, records sent to Denmark from the Government on the Guinea Coast (1698-1754), and accounts sent to Denmark from the Guinea Coast (1698-1754). The company records in Copenhagen, inventory numbers 28-483 (reel numbers 1-27), consist mainly of letter books of the Board of Directors and incoming and outgoing letters and documents. Records in the second group, inventory numbers 880-890 (reel numbers 27-33), include Minutes of the Council at Christiansborg and journals, letter books, and court records. The third group, inventory numbers 891-932 (reel numbers 33-50), consists mostly of account books, cash books, and ledgers.

The New Guinea Company, 1885–1899: A case of unprofitable imperialism∗

(1972). The New Guinea Company, 1885–1899: A case of unprofitable imperialism. Historical Studies: Vol. 15, No. 59, pp. 361-377.

Guinea Company's ships

Guinea Company's ships