Where the Negroes Are Masters

Randy J. Sparks

“If you want to know how the slave trade worked on Africa’s west coast, there is no better starting point than Randy Sparks’s brilliant urban biography of the Gold Coast port of Annamaboe. It elevates our understanding of the Atlantic in the age of the transatlantic slave trade to new heights.”—Ira Berlin, author of Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America

“Randy Sparks takes what might appear to be a minor port on the Gold Coast and gives us a history of the whole Atlantic Basin, through the history of one carefully defined branch of the slave trade. He shows us how multiple actors from different cultures speaking a number of different languages managed to cooperate, argue, compete, and finally succeed in knitting a transatlantic community together. This is a masterpiece of turning micro-history, with its fine detail, into mega-history of the first magnitude.”—John Thornton, author of A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250–1820

“This well-written and altogether gripping story is Atlantic history at its best. Randy Sparks demonstrates the complexity of enslavement itself, examining the multiple processes by which persons came to be construed as property, both on the coast of Africa and in the Atlantic trade.”—Rebecca J. Scott, co-author of Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation

“Randy Sparks’s well-illustrated study of this Gold Coast port expands and deepens our understanding of African middlemen’s importance in the Atlantic economy before 1800 and of the operations of the transatlantic slave trade.”—David Northrup, author of Africa’s Discovery of Europe, 1450–1850

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