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Innovational Eclecticism: The Asante Empire and Europe in the Nineteenth Century*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

T. C. McCaskie
T. C. McCaskie
Affiliation:
Cambridge University
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Extract

It is axiomatic to the expansion of Europe, informal or otherwise, that the perpetrators of that expansion—explorers, officials, missionaries et al.—brought to the societies they infiltrated the ideas, concepts, technology and prejudices of their own cultures. This was a process, which, by definition, encompassed great variations in its penetrative power, dependent as it was on frequently intermittent contact dictated by policy, opportunity, necessity, and numerous other factors. Cultural borrowing on the part of the recipient polity is often seen as mere technological osmosis, the acquisition of more efficient military techniques and weaponry, and the indiscriminate consumption of the externals of European life in the guise of ‘trade goods’. To rest our conclusions here does a considerable disservice to the subtlety of such contacts.

Type
Eclecticism in Borrowing
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , January 1972 , pp. 30 - 45
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1972

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References

1 See inter alia: Huydecoper (1817), Bowdich (1817), Dupuis (1820), Hutton (1820), Freeman (1839 and 1841–2), Wharton (1846), Winniett (1848): Ramseyer and Kuhne (1869–74) and Bonnat (1870–4) were captives in Kumasi.

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4 Ibid.

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