In early 1787, as American vessels flooded the Gold Coast with rum and as the French worked to extend their coastal position, the Cape Coast Castle governor Thomas Price, reported that the Fante, England's coastal allies, ‘are too politic a people, and too well acquainted with their own interests, ever to wish to confine their trade to one nation’. Price's summation of the issues affecting Anglo-Fante relations on the late eighteenth-century Gold Coast (modern Ghana) provides the foundation for this article. This article contributes to West African coastal historiography in that it examines the relationship between the Gold Coast and the Atlantic World through the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The article expands upon this foundation by narrowing the focus to one Gold Coast trade/administrative enclave. It examines the enclave during a period of change, the 1770s to the early 1800s that culminated in radical reconstruction of coastal relations. The article utilises the Fetu city of Cape Coast, also the administrative centre for England's Company of Merchants Trading to Africa (hereafter CMTA), to examine the relationship between Atlantic (external) and coastal (internal) factors within an African trade enclave. To accomplish this, it eliminates the dichotomy that exists between exploring general coastal trends within a diverse coastal region. This raises a question concerning the consequence of these general trends upon diverse states, cultures and peoples. Do the general trends affect each group similarly or differently and, if so, why? The focus upon one Gold Coast enclave expands our understanding of the consequences caused by the interaction of Atlantic and coastal factors.

‘One of the greatest advantages a traveller brings back from his journeys’, wrote the chevalier d'Arvieux in 1673, ‘is that he rejects the prejudices imbibed in his own country against strangers, something which those who never leave will never accomplish.’ For with direct exposure to foreign cultures, explained Simon de la Loubère two decades later, one learns ‘that there is not in any place anything marvellous or extravagant’. The seventeenth century in European history witnessed a great exodus of articulate globetrotters from every walk of life who sought adventure, wealth, and reputation. This was an age, indeed, when Europeans could be found in nearly every corner of the world. Moreover, many of these individuals wrote extensively of their experiences, reporting details of geography, climate, flora, fauna and the natural wealth of the lands they visited. Their accounts are also enriched by the close attention paid to the fullness and richness of the social, religious, and cultural aspects of the people who occupied these non-Christian, non-European societies. In short, the anthropological, even ethnographic elements of these travelogues constitute an extraordinarily rich source for modern historians that, until recently, has rarely been mined by scholars who have tended to limit themselves instead to the political and commercial contacts between Europe and the wider world during the Age of Discovery and Exploration.

In this study, I examine how ‘ethnic’ trading networks are created and recreated, but may also fracture and fall apart. This occurred among some Indian groups in East Africa, who initially strengthened their economic and cultural ties with India by maintaining intensive trade relations and taking brides from the homeland. However, after just one generation, their economic focus was on East Africa, Japan and the UK. Many of today's well-off Indian businessmen in East Africa show little economic interest in India. In fact, Gujarati businessmen in East Africa created new, rather negative images of their counterparts in Gujarat. During the last century, their overall image of Indians in India was transformed from one of a ‘reliable family or community members’ to one of ‘unreliable, corrupt and, untrustworthy ‘others’.

That which the Dutch called Ligor is the present-day southern province of Nakhon Si Thammarat in Thailand. It was one of the oldest city-states and flourishing entrepôts in Southeast Asia. Dutch East India Company (VOC) documents reveal that the Company traded tin in Ligor and had a small office there for more than a century from around 1640 until 1756. In fact, the relationship between the VOC and Ligor had already been established a few decades earlier when Ligor was still enjoying much autonomy with respect to self-governance, trade, and foreign contacts.