A Slave Trader’s Complex Household on the Gold Coast: Richard Brew, Castle Brew, and the 18th-Century African Atlantic World

Annamaboe, a Fante town on the Gold Coast, was one of the primary slave trading ports of the 18th Century. The most successful British slave trader there was Richard Brew, first an employee of the Royal African Company and later a private merchant. Brew was the most active British merchant on the Gold Coast from the 1750s to his death and he claimed to have sold more captives off the Coast than any other individual. He imported huge amounts of trade goods that he used to barter for the hundreds of enslaved men, women and children he sold annually. Those goods flowed in and out of the storerooms of Castle Brew, itself a monument to the Atlantic World and Brew’s place in it. In many respects, the Georgian mansion he built there was a microcosm of the African Atlantic World. It sheltered his mixed-race African family and connected him to John Corrantee, the most able political leader in Annamaboe’s history. Castle Brew was the hub of his business enterprise, which stretched up and down the coast, into the African interior, to Europe, and to the Americas. Its storerooms held goods from India, Africa, Europe, and America, and African slaves imprisoned in its pens. His business employed men from Ireland, England, and the Americas, and local Africans. He entertained ship’s captains in lavish style, hosted religious services, and listened to musical performances on the hall’s organ. He was well known throughout the Atlantic World. His position as a merchant in Annamaboe might seem to be an isolated one, far removed from the main currents of day, but his deep integration into the eighteenth-century Atlantic World emphasized the important position that Annamaboe played as one of the nodes of the great commercial, social, and cultural network that defined it.