Between 1400 and 1700 CE the lands that stretch from the seaside to the northern territories of modern-day Ghana were the site of tremendous change for their inhabitants. As with much of human history, long-distance trade and interactions between culturally diverse peoples drove many of the changes. Yet, as is always the case with human societies, these external stimuli also caused myriad forms of growth and change within communities over time. The first wave of change came from the north, where the caravan traders who had long crisscrossed the Sahara desert gradually extended their routes southward to the rainforest of modern-day Ghana for one simple reason: the land was endowed with some of the richest gold deposits on earth. The gold deposits of the Pra, Ofin, and Volta River basins attracted caravan traders from the Western Sudan in the early second millennium CE, long before maritime technology enabled distant foreigners to trade on Ghana’s coast. Processes of population growth, urbanization, and migration centered on the edge of the Sahara began to change the political, economic, and cultural landscape of southern Ghana, therefore, long before the activities of Europeans had any influence on historical change in West Africa.

European traders did initiate a second wave of change in the region, beginning with the arrival of Portuguese ships on the Gold Coast in the year 1471; however, the effects of European trade on the coast came slowly and in distinct phases. For the first two hundred years of European trade on Ghana’s coastline, gold—not enslaved Africans—was the main commodity sought by European traders on the Gold Coast. During the 1600s several European kingdoms (including the Netherlands, England, France, Denmark, Sweden, and Brandenburg) competed for Gold Coast trade, building fortifications along Ghana’s beaches to prevent one another from the lucrative gold trade. The trade in human captives on the Gold Coast in this era was between European sellers and African buyers, a total reversal of the pattern developing elsewhere in Atlantic Africa in the seventeenth century. Slaves were increasingly used in the interior forests of Ghana for gold mining, farming, and expanding elites’ households.