Africa, Gold and Global Trade

In this episode, Lisa Hellman interviews Edmond Smith (the University of Manchester) about border-making on the West coast of Africa. In the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries the Akan region was engaged in a profitable global gold trade via carefully regulated borderlands. In the north, market towns acted as hubs for the trans-Saharan gold trade while, to the south, trade with Europeans was restricted to trading posts on the Atlantic coast. In both cases, the gold trade was encouraged while outsiders – whether Wangara in the north or Portuguese in the south – were regulated in terms of their access to the gold-producing hinterland.