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Accumulation, wealth and belief in Asante history: I. To the close of the nineteenth century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2011

T. C. McCaskie
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Extract

The present article is intended as the first of two contributions to the economic and social– but above all to the intellectual– history of the West African forest kingdom of Asante or Ashanti (now located in the Republic of Ghana). Both papers will attempt to pull together and to situate in a ‘mentalist’ framework a number of recent and confessedly disparate research findings concerning a cluster of concepts, ideas and beliefs that, merely for the sake of brevity at this point, I will assign simply to the embracing ‘neutral’ rubric of general transformations in the ideology (or ideologies) of wealth. The first article will be concerned with developments in Asante society up to the close of the nineteenth century (defined here interpretatively rather than in strictly chronological terms); its successor will concentrate on a highly detailed examination of a sequence of crucially telling events in the early colonial period, and upon selected developments thereafter in the twentieth century. The articles are designed and intended to be read sequentially; the first, it is hoped, will assist in making sense of the significantly denser context (and more detailed content) of the second.

Résumé

Accumulation, richesse et croyance en histoire Asante I. Vers la fin du dix-neuvième siècle

L'article tend à réconcilier les vues ‘anthropologiques’ et ‘historiques’ du passé des Asante. Il se concentre sur les discrets – mais essentiellement importants – ensembles d'attitudes envers la richesse, l'accumulation et ‘l'argent’ en général. La substance de l'article est une revue générale des attitudes des Asante à l'égard de ces sujets entre la période ‘proto-Asante’ (disons, au seizième siècle), et durant la conquête britannique en 1896. La plupart de l'article est ‘conjectural’, au sens très précis de ‘deviner’ ce qui vraiment eu lieu; tout cela, l'auteur espère, est fondé sur l'appréciation réaliste de la dynamique de l'histoire Asante, et la substance de l'article cherche à contrebalancer le positivisme si prédominant en historiographie tant africaine que plus spécialement Asante. L'auteur ne cherche pas à s'excuser de ses ‘hypotheses’, mais, au contraire, suggère que cette sorte d'approche – sensiblement suggestive, et à la fois bien informée – pourrait être une direction nouvelle à l'égard des études historiques africaines.

Type
Rank and wealth among the Akan
Information
Africa , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , January 1983 , pp. 23 - 43
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 1983

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