Introduction

Bitu, also known as Bighu or Begho, was a market town that lay in the Banda region of West Africa just south of the River Volta in what is present-day Ghana. It was identified as something akin to Eldorado within the Arab world – something immensely wealthy and just beyond reach – a perception adopted by European actors as they became familiar with the region. In the 17th-century history of the Songhai Empire, the Ta’rīkh al-Fattāsh, the historiographer Ibn al-Mukhtar recorded that during the rise of the Malian empire ‘the gold mines’ of the western Niger ‘have no parallel in all the Takrūr, except in the land of the Bergo’ at Bitu. Even though merchants (known as Wangara) from Timbuktu and other cities within the Malian and Songhai empires had regularly participated in the trading caravans southward, al-Mukhtar could only identify the trading centre at Bitu as a source of gold and had no knowledge of the actual Akan mining centres further south (Wise, 2011: 74– 5; Nobili and Shahid Mathee, 2015: 37– 73). The Moroccan physician and author Wazir al-Ghassani similarly wrote about ‘a place called Bitu where there are mines of gold and of gold dust’. He understood that the town was where ‘those who have the salt of Taghaza origin and those who have the gold of Bitu origin meet each other’ but remained unable to describe the origins of the gold, only that it was a source ‘without equal in the universe’ and that ‘everyone finds great profit in going there to trade, and thus fortunes are made of which God alone knows the size’. Indeed, from al-Ghassani's perspective, Timbuktu itself owed its wealth to the Bitu caravans, and he argued that ‘it is because of this blessed town that caravans converge at Timbuktu from all points of the horizon, from east, west, south, and north’ (Wilks, 1982a: 343).

For these commentators, Bitu was a site of international trade that served to connect the merchants of the western Niger – from cities with their own advanced economies – with a precious commodity that underpinned economic activity across northern Africa and beyond.

The English East India Company (EIC) was an organization like no other in England, with privileges regarding the right to make treaties and engage in military activities that were essential for the Company's expansion in Asia. In many respects, this was delegation of sovereignty from the English crown, and the EIC arranged treaties, engaged in military conflict and imposed laws. In Asia, the experience of the Company diplomatically was often through negotiations with states and interested parties in the region with whom they sought to obtain preferential treaties and rights to trade. While much of the historiography has examined the importance of conflict and ‘unequal treaties’ between the Company and Asian states, the diplomacy undertaken by the EIC was far more sophisticated. As Janice Thomson suggests, merchant companies ‘were based on a state-granted monopoly to trade between the home country and regions outside of Europe. Though they were financed largely with ‘private’ capital, they were not private organizations in the modern sense. They possessed military, judicial, and diplomatic power.’ In spite of the substantial powers taken by the EIC, the practice of trade in the East Indies was curtailed to reflect current political necessities for the English crown. While the EIC's charter did state that trade could be conducted anywhere in ‘Asia & Africa & America in any of them beyond the Cape of Bona Esperansa to the Straights of Magellan’, there were limitations. Specifically, it was clear that ‘the same trade must not be undertaken [to any place] already in the lawful & actual possession of any such Christian Princes or States, as at this point or at any time hereafter shall be in League of Amity with us our Heirs or successors.’ This meant that, in theory, the EIC was restricted from opposing other European powers active in Asia, and the crown sought to ensure that its own diplomatic activities in Europe would not be undercut through the EIC's activities in Asia.

In spite of attempts by the crown to restrain the Company, the latter's diplomatic and military efforts were not limited to engagement with Asian states. Competition with other Europeans was a common state of affairs for the EIC.