ABSTRACT
In the eighteenth century, the port cities of West Africa experienced the development of a newly Atlantic-inflected material cosmopolitanism. While trade had linked Western Africa for centuries, it was only during the eighteenth century that the Atlantic World developed a unique, cosmopolitan material culture. This chapter will explore the development of new ‘consumption clusters’ (or assemblages) in urban West Africa. The expansion of new forms of global trade, and the incorporation of new goods into existing quotidian and ceremonial rituals – mealtimes, personal display, household decoration, state dinners, annual tariff negotiations – highlights the power of localized value systems in shaping use, and the power of ‘the cosmopolitan’ in eighteenth century ideas of fashion and ‘modernity’. Looking at Western Africa, generally, and Sierra Leone, specifically, will show how material cosmopolitanism was shaped over the eighteenth century, and suggest different ways of interpreting the region’s commercial engagement with the Atlantic World towards the end of the period of the legal Atlantic slave trade.
