Cross Cultural Engagement in Eighteenth Century Africa: Contestation and Negotiation.

The European origins of contemporary international society have been well documented. A key component of this multifaceted genealogy is the outward expansion of European political authority. This is traditionally held to have begun with the Iberian conquests of the fifteenth century, and would eventually culminate in the global imperial order of the early twentieth century. Existing accounts of European expansion primarily concentrate upon cases where European power was predominant, and thereby downplay or otherwise disregard situations where European agents were forced to work within indigenous models of political authority. This can lead to a misleading, one-sided image of a complex process of cross-cultural engagement. By the eighteenth century, European Powers had developed extensive commercial networks in many parts of the globe, but often found it difficult to dictate terms to various partners. In west Africa, vulnerable trading posts were dependent upon local elites, as trading networks developed around gold and slaves, yet Europeans consistently found themselves beholden to local political forces. This can be seen as a fragile, yet nonetheless identifiable international order, with non-European models of political authority enjoying international parity and/or preponderence. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]