The importance of Africa and African agency in the formation of the Atlantic world is now widely acknowledged by historians, but Africa has drawn less attention than other regions in analyses of the British Atlantic. Drawing upon the nascent methodology of global microhistory, this article contributes to a scholarly rebalancing by examining two maritime lawsuits from the 1640s concerning British voyages to Senegambia and Sierra Leone, both of which resulted in conflict between British seafarers and with their African trading partners. A close study of the documents surviving from these lawsuits provides an unusually detailed glimpse of these particular moments of contact and violence across cultures. More fundamentally, such an approach illuminates the ocean-spanning networks within which these ventures took place, and reveals the ways in which British traders and sailors perceived trade in Africa within their own legal frameworks. This article argues that by the middle of the seventeenth century, as merchants and politicians in Britain began to imagine an Atlantic empire, trade in West Africa was an important part of their vision of the Atlantic world.

William Ansah Sessarakoo, the son of a powerful Fante slave trader on the Gold Coast, was tricked and sold into slavery in Barbados by a British ship’s captain during the 1740s. He was emancipated and brought to Britain in 1748, where he enjoyed a brief period of national celebrity before returning to the Gold Coast in 1750. This paper examines the specific political and cultural circumstances surrounding his remarkable journey, through the lens of the media generated about him during his time in Britain. It demonstrates that the most extensive contemporaneous account of Sessarakoo’s story, The Royal African, was in reality an attempt to generate popular support for a moribund Royal African Company and incorporate slave trading into narratives of national identity, based on notions of economic responsibility and honour. Adhering to conventions typified in Thomas Southerne’s stage adaptation of Oroonoko, further popular representations of Sessarakoo emphasised his aristocratic status and putatively inherited ‘noble’ characteristics. In doing so, they emphasised perceived differences between him and the majority of African peoples, who were deemed suitable for enslavement. The paper closes with an examination of some of the effects of Sessarakoo’s visit on Euro-African trade and diplomacy on the Gold Coast.

Minh Hương—often translated as ‘Ming Refugees’, became a powerful interest group in Vietnamese commerce, colonization, and politics between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Curiously, they remain understudied and misunderstood by both Vietnamese and Overseas Chinese specialists. This results from confusion about Minh Hương identity and origins, which this article addresses by analyzing the evolution of the group’s identity and the interests and institutions that shaped it. Far from static, Minh Hương identity formed, metamorphosed, and all but disappeared due to the interplay between changing circumstances and adaptive responses that continually reshaped the content of Minh Hương identity whenever “outside” circumstances challenged them. In this way, the Minh Hương evolved from its merchant diaspora origins into a powerful merchant-bureaucratic class that exploited the institutions that Vietnamese matrilineage and Chinese patrilineage afforded them in order to advance its commercial and political interests. When their status eroded in the nineteenth century, the Minh Hương redefined their group as a minority ethnicity in defense of diminishing rights. Far from the powerless refugee minority image their name implies, their behaviour so reminiscent of merchant cultures from the Sogdians to the Swahili, the Minh Hương deserves greater consideration in the literature on merchant cultures in world history.

This article examines the journey undertaken by the slave ship Brilhante, captured by a British anti-slave trade patrol off the coast of Brazil in 1838. The ship and its crew were engaged in slave trafficking in contravention of international treaty agreements. In accordance with prize law the Brilhante was condemned by the Anglo-Brazilian mixed commission court in Rio de Janeiro and the slaves on-board were freed and apprenticed for a prescribed number of years. This article argues that during their apprenticeships not only were these Africans treated in the same way as slaves, but they formed similar bonds for survival. Both ethnic solidarity and shipmate bonds, which transcended ethnic boundaries, allowed them to forge new identities. The article demonstrates how the liberated Africans from the ship, who belonged to a larger marginalised group of “recaptives” within the Atlantic World, were thus able to facilitate the achievement of their eventual freedom, and improve the conditions in which they lived.