ABSTRACT
The issue of trust and credibility is at the heart of treaty-making and complaints about breaches and mutual distrust have as long a history as treaties themselves. In early modern Europe, elaborated procedures of securing treaties and agreements had been established but less is known about such practices in cross-cultural contexts and they functioned differently from intra-European treaty-making. This chapter addresses these questions by looking at treaties concluded between West African rulers and elites and European trading companies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. First, it explores what treaty-making meant to the various actors involved, addressing treaties as objects circulating between Africa and Europe. How were established procedures of securing agreements from within Europe adapted to cross-cultural settings? What role did signatures, oaths, and hostages play? And to what extent did treaty-making at the Gold and Slave coasts become a transcultural practice in its own right? In the second part, the chapter traces the trajectories of these treaties within Europe and I show how treaties were copied and organized in document collections, ready to be used as arguments in diplomatic quarrels within Europe. In such quarrels, Afro-European treaties served both to bolster and criticize claims to sovereignty and hegemony.
