A Possession That No Longer Paid
By the middle of the nineteenth century the Dutch Gold Coast had become an expensive habit. The West India Company was long gone, the slave trade — the commercial logic on which the forts had been built — had been illegal for Dutch subjects since 1814, and the legitimate trade in gold, palm oil and timber that replaced it flowed increasingly through British hands. The garrisons still had to be paid, the walls still had to be repaired, and the fever season still killed officials faster than the Ministry of Colonies could replace them.
The awkwardness was compounded by geography. Dutch and British forts stood interleaved along the same short stretch of coast, sometimes within sight of one another, each drawing customs revenue from neighbouring communities and each undercutting the other's attempts to regulate trade.
The Exchange of 1867
The first attempt at a solution was territorial tidying rather than withdrawal. Under an agreement concluded in 1867 and carried out at the beginning of 1868, the two powers swapped forts to create contiguous spheres: Britain took everything east of a line at the Sweet River near Elmina, the Netherlands everything west of it. Fort Crèvecoeur at Accra passed to Britain; several British posts in the west passed to the Netherlands.
Nobody had asked the people who lived there. Communities that had dealt with the English for generations found themselves handed to the Dutch, and several refused. Komenda and other western towns resisted, in places by force, and the Dutch spent the next years trying to establish authority over an unwilling coastline. The exchange also helped provoke the formation of the Fante Confederation, a coalition of coastal states that set out to organise its own affairs in the face of European rearrangement. Far from simplifying the Dutch position, 1867 made it untenable.
The Treaties of 1870–71
Withdrawal followed. The Gold Coast cession was part of a wider settlement of Anglo-Dutch business negotiated in 1870 and signed in 1871, which also covered British acquiescence in Dutch freedom of action in Sumatra — with consequences that would soon appear in the Aceh War — and arrangements for the emigration of indentured labourers from British India to Suriname.
The Gold Coast component was, in strictly financial terms, tiny. Britain acquired the Dutch forts and settlements, paying only for stores, materials and movable property; the sums recorded are under four thousand pounds. The territory itself was transferred without price, on the reasoning that neither party held it as saleable property. Ratifications were exchanged early in 1872, and on 6 April 1872 the Dutch flag came down over Elmina Castle for the last time.
The Asante Objection
From Kumasi the transaction looked not merely unwelcome but invalid. Asante had held a formal relationship with the Dutch at Elmina since the early eighteenth century, expressed in the document known as the Elmina Note and in the regular payment that accompanied it. In the Asante reading that payment was rent for the ground on which the castle stood, which meant the Netherlands occupied Elmina as a tenant and could not sell what it did not own. Asantehene Kofi Karikari protested; the protest was set aside.
The Dutch and British reading was different — the payment had been a customary gratuity, a subsidy to keep a trading partner friendly, and carried no implication of Asante sovereignty. Britain, having taken over, simply stopped paying it. The two interpretations were never reconciled, and the dispute is examined in more detail in our article on the Elmina Note.
Consequences
The immediate effect at Elmina was disorder. A substantial part of the town's population regarded itself as bound to Asante, or at least as having chosen the Dutch and not the British; there was unrest, some residents left, and the new administration met the town with force.
The larger consequence was war. With the Dutch gone, Asante had lost its counterweight on the coast, its guaranteed outlet to the sea and its most reliable European correspondent. In 1873 Asante armies crossed the Pra; the campaign that followed ended with a British force under Sir Garnet Wolseley entering and burning Kumasi in February 1874. The Gold Coast was declared a British colony later that year.
Seen from The Hague, 1871 was the sensible liquidation of an unprofitable asset. Seen from Kumasi, it was the moment a two-hundred-year relationship was disposed of without consultation, and the beginning of the end of Asante independence.
