Akan Relations, Commercial Networks, and the Portuguese Empire in West Africa, 1482–1637

T Akan regions of West Africa, lying in what is now Ghana and the Ivory Coast, were, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, one of the most consistently high producing sources of gold in the world. In the “highly auriferous area in the forest country between the Komoe and Volta rivers”—knownmore accessibly as the Akan goldfields—this valuable commodity was extracted, processed, and then traded locally and more widely across the region. After 1482, this northerly transSaharan trade (which famously exchanged salt from Taghaza for Akan gold via Timbuktu) was supplemented by the establishment of trade with the permanent Portuguese outpost to the south of the Akan region—São Jorge da Mina. Portuguese empire building on what they