Asante was a West African state whose military expansion helped supply the Atlantic slave trade and whose economy was reorganized, rather than freed from slavery, when that trade ended. Its history in the account links conquest, commodity production, and coerced labor: captives taken in the eighteenth-century Akan Wars were exported, while after 1807 enslaved people were retained and put to work within the empire.

Expansion and the Akan Wars

After 1700, Asante expanded from the interior of the Gold Coast, in what is now Ghana. During the first half of the eighteenth century, its campaigns against neighboring independent states triggered the Akan Wars. Gyaman, the last of the states named in this sequence, was conquered in 1747. The wars were not separate from the expanding slave trade: most of the estimated 375,000 people exported from the Gold Coast between 1700 and 1750 were captives taken in these conflicts.

This pattern connected political growth to warfare and the export of people. Asante’s expansion brought neighboring states under its power, while the capture of their inhabitants supplied the coastal trade. The book describes a wider regional dynamic in which states grew powerful through military campaigns tied to slave exports; Asante’s conquest of independent polities was part of that process.

Reorganization after 1807

The end of the external slave trade in 1807 did not end slavery in Asante. With export through the coastal slave markets no longer available, the political elite reorganized the economy, retaining enslaved people and redirecting their labor within the empire. They were settled on large plantations first around the capital, Kumase, and later across much of the interior corresponding to present-day Ghana.

Enslaved workers produced gold and kola nuts for export and also grew food. They were used extensively as porters because Asante did not use wheeled transportation. These roles show how the shift away from exporting enslaved people changed the destination of their labor without ending the coercive system: people who had been captured and sold abroad were instead compelled to support production, food supply, and transport within Asante.

Slavery’s persistence and scale

The reorganization in Asante formed part of a broader regional pattern. In the nineteenth century, slavery appears to have expanded in Africa rather than contracted. Precise figures are difficult to establish, but contemporary accounts by travelers and merchants suggest that well over half the population in Asante, Dahomey, and the Yoruba city-states was enslaved.

That estimate is presented as suggestive rather than exact: the surviving accounts do not provide a definitive count. Even with that limitation, the comparison underscores the scale and persistence of slavery in Asante after the Atlantic trade’s end. More broadly, the book argues that institutions and practices shaped by the earlier slave trade endured, as African political elites adapted coerced labor to new commercial uses rather than relinquishing it.