The Elmina Middle
Elmina in the first half of the nineteenth century was not simply a Dutch fort with an African town beside it. It was a society in its own right, and one of its most consequential groups was the Euro-African families descended from unions between Dutch officials or soldiers and Akan women. Names such as Bartels, Vroom, Nieser and Ulzen recur across the records for generations. These families were neither Dutch nor wholly of the town, and their usefulness came precisely from that position.
Carel Hendrik Bartels was among the most prominent of them. He was active as a merchant at Elmina during the first half of the nineteenth century, in the period when the Dutch establishment was shifting away from the slave trade and casting about for something to replace it. Like others of his background, he was educated in the Dutch manner and moved with equal facility in the fort and in the town.
What a Coastal Merchant Actually Did
The commercial position of a man like Bartels rested on functions that neither the Dutch administration nor inland traders could perform for themselves:
- advancing goods on credit to inland traders and carrying the risk on them;
- assembling produce — gold, ivory, later palm oil — in quantities worth shipping;
- interpreting, in the full sense: language, but also custom, protocol and the intentions of the parties;
- standing surety, so that agreements between people who could not enforce a contract on each other could nonetheless be made;
- maintaining relations with the Asante authorities whose control of the roads determined whether anything moved at all.
None of this depended on the Dutch governor's goodwill in the way the governor's business depended on the merchants'. Dutch officials came for a few years and often died; the merchant families were permanent.
Recruitment for the Indies
After the 1837 agreement between Major-General Jan Verveer and Asantehene Kwaku Dua I, Elmina became the collection point for men recruited into the Netherlands East Indies Army. Making that work required exactly the skills the Euro-African merchants had: contacts with Asante suppliers, the ability to move people and goods along the road from Kumasi, credit, and the willingness to handle a transaction that the Dutch state wished to keep at arm's length. Bartels is documented as one of those involved on the Elmina side.
This is where his career becomes difficult to write about comfortably. The men delivered were, in many cases, unfree people manumitted at the point of enlistment so that the arrangement could be presented as voluntary. The merchants who handled them were operating within a legal framework the Dutch state had constructed for that purpose. Whether one describes their role as commerce or as a continuation of slave dealing under another name is a genuine question, and historians answer it differently.
Where Power Really Sat
The wider point Bartels's career illustrates is that the Dutch presence on the Gold Coast was never a straightforward colonial administration governing a subject population. The Netherlands held a fort and a stretch of coast on terms that depended on Asante consent inland and on local intermediaries at the shore. The people who could operate in both directions accumulated real power, and they used it in their own interest as well as anyone else's.
That position eroded after the transfer of Elmina to Britain in 1872. British commercial structures and, later, colonial administration favoured different networks, and the specifically Dutch-connected families lost the advantage that had made them indispensable. Many descendants remained prominent in Gold Coast public life; the particular brokerage role did not survive.
The Records
Bartels appears in the Dutch Gold Coast administrative records held in the Netherlands, and the Euro-African families of Elmina have been studied in detail by Michel Doortmont among others, working from correspondence, church registers and administrative papers. It should be said plainly that the biographical detail for these figures is uneven: dates, family relationships and the extent of individual involvement in particular transactions are often reconstructed from fragmentary evidence, and general statements about what such a merchant did are on firmer ground than precise claims about any single deal.
