Ransom as Political Strategy: Captivity beyond Commercial Transaction on the Upper Guinea Coast in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title>
<jats:p>Histories of ransoming in West Africa have placed it alongside a host of related practices including pawning, panyarring, kidnapping, and enslavement, and firmly within histories of long-distance slave trading. This article considers how ransom functioned outside the conventional trans-Atlantic economic frameworks within which it is often placed by scholars. Drawing on cases from the Upper Guinea Coast, the article argues that hostage-taking for ransom was often a political act. Where political alliances were built and maintained through the exchange of people, ransom was a tool that could be employed to assert, maintain, or regain authority. Ransom reconsidered therefore offers important and overlooked evidence of the persistence of social and economic life in the shadow of macro-historical changes ushered in by transoceanic slave trading.</jats:p>