Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660–1914

Hanseatic Networks in Tropical Markets
oil, and other goods before returning to Europe to complete the three
stage cycle. 68
Such transactions were part of a longer term transformation of the
relationship between Europe and West Africa in the nineteenth century,
following the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade by the
British government in 1806. 69 Long a source of slave labour for
American and Caribbean plantations and white households, the peoples
of Western Africa had extensive ties to European markets.
European businessmen, however, remained heavily dependent on
African middlemen and regional authorities along the coast to facilitate
the exchanges of people and other commercial goods that were
subsequently shipped overseas. Lying at a point of convergence
between two major arteries of world commerce—the trans-Atlantic
trade between western Europe and South America, and the long-distance
route to India, China, and Australia via the Cape of Good
Hope—the West African market offered overseas shippers en route
to other destinations the opportunity to exchange goods from Europe
or the Americas.
During the 1850s, merchant ships sailing the West African coast
served as floating marketplaces for commercial exchanges to take
place in regions lacking safe harbours. Hanseatic merchants were
active in this trade beginning in 1832, often as part of a longer voyage
to or from South American destinations. 70 The main harbour of
Sierra Leone, Freetown, was the first location in West Africa where a
few Hamburg merchants, Johann Daniel Eppfenhausen, Johann
Gottfried Nagel, and Ernst Ceasar Hartung, took steps to establish a
fixed trading post in the early 1840s. 71 Conflicts with the British colonial
administrators over alleged violations of the Navigation Acts,
which had not yet been abolished, led to a series of accusations in
Hamburg and Britain about unfair business practices on both sides.
68 Washausen, Hamburg und die Kolonialpolitk, 90; Willi A. Boelcke, So kam das
Meer zu uns: Die preussich-deutsche Kriegsmarine in Übersee 1822 bis 1914 (Frankfurt
am Main, 1981), 197–8; Schramm, Deutschland, 273–5, 330–2.
69 Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an
Empire’s Slaves (Boston, 2005), provides an up-to-date and compelling ac -
count of this process.
70 Schramm, Deutschland und Übersee, 171–7.
71 Ibid. 203–16.
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