Rebecca Shumway

West African Roots of Pan-Africanism

This book will explain how the ending of the transatlantic slave trade affected the history of Ghana from 1807 to1874. It will explain those changes and continuities in a way that highlights Ghana’s continued links to other places around the Atlantic Ocean—especially Britain, Sierra Leone, the West Indies, and Nigeria. Local conditions, including ongoing wars between the coastal Fante and the Asante kingdom, the expansion of slavery within Ghana, and the proliferation of mission schools and Christian churches, are also considered. Additionally, this book will also assess the historical roots of the Ghana’s 1868 Fante Confederation.

Rebecca Shumway is Associate Professor of History and an Affiliate of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the author of The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Rochester University Press, 2011) which was a finalist for the Herskovitz Prize in African Studies, co-editor of Slavery and its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), and is completing a book on the political history of Ghana, 1807-1874, under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press. She has written numerous scholarly articles on Ghana, the slave trade, Anglo-African relations and anti-slavery. Her work addresses Ghana’s relationship to the Atlantic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with a focus on the Fante-speaking population. She has been a Fulbright-Hays scholar, among other fellowships.