22 entries
Trade centres · fl. c. 1800–1870s
Bopolu (Bokoma)
Capital of the Condo Confederation and the principal inland entrepôt of western Liberia.
Trade centres · exported from the 16th century
Camwood
Baphia nitida, the red dyewood of the Bassa and Kru coast — for two centuries the region's most valuable legal export.
Trade centres · named 1461
Cape Mount
The great Vai headland and lagoon port at the northwestern corner of the coast.
Trade centres · named 1461
Cape Palmas
The Grebo headland where the coast turns east toward the Ivory Coast.
Trade centres · pre-1822 and continuing
Country cloth
Narrow-strip cotton woven on the men's horizontal loom, sewn into gowns and blankets — a currency and a mark of rank.
Trade centres · pre-1822
Currencies of the Grain Coast
Country cloth, iron bars, salt cones, kissi pennies and manillas — the plural money of a region without coin.
Trade centres · pre-1822 and continuing
Grand Bassa
The St John estuary and its chain of Bassa towns: rice, camwood and a coast trading on its own terms.
Trade centres · pre-1822 and continuing
Indigo and dyeing
Fermented indigo vats, camwood red and kola brown: a chemistry practised by women across the region.
Trade centres · attested from the first millennium CE
Iron smelting and the blacksmith
Bloomery furnaces, laterite ore and the ritually charged authority of the smith across the Liberian forest.
Trade centres · fl. late 18th–early 19th century
Jumbo Town
A trading town of the Bassa littoral whose merchants brokered the contacts that led the Colonization Society's agents to Cape Mesurado.
Trade centres · in use before 1822 into the 20th century
Kissi pennies
Twisted iron rods, T-headed at one end, used as currency across the Kissi, Loma, Gbandi and Mende country.
Trade centres · traded from at least the 14th century
Kola nut
The forest stimulant that paid for the northern trade: currency, medicine, sacrament and diplomatic gift.
Trade centres · documented from the 16th century
Kru mariners
The surf-canoe seamen of the Kru coast, contracted by European shipping across the whole Atlantic seaboard of Africa.
Trade centres · traded from the 14th century
Malagueta pepper
Grain of paradise: the spice that named the coast and financed its first Atlantic exchanges.
Trade centres · carved c. 1400–1600
Nomoli and pomdo stone figures
Soapstone figures found buried in Kissi and Sherbro country, ascribed by their finders to earlier inhabitants.
Trade centres · cultivated for at least three thousand years
Rice agriculture
Oryza glaberrima, African rice — domesticated in West Africa, farmed on upland and swamp, and the region's staple wealth.
Trade centres · c. 1500–1860s
The Atlantic trade on the Grain Coast
How the Liberian coast participated in, resisted and was reshaped by the transatlantic slave trade.
Trade centres · pre-1822 and continuing
The coastal salt industry
Sea-salt boiled and evaporated in the lagoons of the Vai and Dei coast — the coast's chief export to the interior.
Trade centres · c. 1461–1800s
The Grain Coast
The European name for this shore, from the malagueta pepper — grain of paradise — that it exported.
Trade centres · 15th–19th centuries
The ivory trade
Elephant tusks from the forest interior, and the carved ivories that made the Upper Guinea coast famous in Renaissance Europe.
Trade centres · c. 1500–1900
The Musardu road
The caravan route linking the Mande markets of the interior to the Atlantic at Cape Mesurado.
Trade centres · devised c. 1832–33
The Vai script
An indigenous syllabary invented by Dualu Bukele and his associates — one of the few independently created writing systems in modern history.