Annamaboe was the largest slave trading port on the eighteenth-century Gold Coast, and it was home to successful, wily African merchants whose unusual partnerships with their European counterparts made the town and its people an integral part of the Atlantic’s webs of exchange. Where the Negroes Are Masters brings to life the outpost’s feverish commercial bustle and continual brutality, recovering the experiences of the entrepreneurial black and white men who thrived on the lucrative traffic in human beings.

Located in present-day Ghana, the port of Annamaboe brought the town’s Fante merchants into daily contact with diverse peoples: Englishmen of the Royal African Company, Rhode Island Rum Men, European slave traders, and captured Africans from neighboring nations. Operating on their own turf, Annamaboe’s African leaders could bend negotiations with Europeans to their own advantage, as they funneled imported goods from across the Atlantic deep into the African interior and shipped vast cargoes of enslaved Africans to labor in the Americas.

Far from mere pawns in the hands of the colonial powers, African men and women were major players in the complex networks of the slave trade. Randy Sparks captures their collective experience in vivid detail, uncovering how the slave trade arose, how it functioned from day to day, and how it transformed life in Annamaboe and made the port itself a hub of Atlantic commerce. From the personal, commercial, and cultural encounters that unfolded along Annamaboe’s shore emerges a dynamic new vision of the early modern Atlantic world.

"Where the Negroes Are Masters is a pathfinding work that surely will have great influence on our understanding of ‘the largest forced migration in history.’ Sparks is a diligent researcher who shows the many ways in which the Fante leadership entrenched its position in the trade… An interesting and important book." - Washington Post

"Carefully researched, completely engaging… Sparks recounts a story that is so telling, and so profound in its implications, that it should be explored in every school in the land—and used as a touchstone for a new way of describing the birth of America." - School Library Journal

"Africans entered the trans-Atlantic slave trade as more than cargo; many operated as wily merchants integral to the far-reaching Atlantic commerce that began with European contact and the search for gold in the 1430s and shifted to traffic in humans… Unveiling African merchant elites functioning as cultural brokers, literate in English and traveled in Europe and the Americas, and operating as major forces responding to 18th-century market opportunities, Sparks expands our understanding of the Atlantic connections of West Africa’s coastal trading communities." - Library Journal (starred review)

"This persuasive, well-researched study of the 18th-century Atlantic slave trade takes the unique approach of examining ‘the African merchant elites who facilitated that trade,’ who, according to Tulane University history professor Sparks, ‘were as essential to the Atlantic economy as the merchants of Liverpool, Nantes, or Middleburg.’ That premise may be somewhat surprising, if not outright provocative, but he delivers proof." - Publishers Weekly