A Creolized Atlantic World

To begin, I though Randy Sparks’s The Two Princes of Calabar was a great book. In particular, I found his argument of the creolization of the Atlantic world very intriguing. I also thought, Sparks successfully demonstrated the creolization of the Robin Johns and other Old and New Calabar merchant elite. I, however, am curious about the degree to which the creole culture influenced English merchants and other European slave traders. As Sparks’s book stands, I’m not sure that it did. To be clear, I think such an argument was outside the bounds of his study, which meant to demonstrate that the Robin Johns were a product of the creolized culture that allowed them to successfully navigate socio-political landscapes in which they found themselves enslaved. Nevertheless, I wonder to what degree this creolization process was mutually influential, or was the hybridized culture adopted only by the elites of Calabar—a sort of soft imposition by Europeans? There does seem to be some English adoption of Efik ideas and discourse. For instance, the English seem to have shared the legal justification for slavery as a product of war booty (if not necessarily followed in practice by the Europeans) that the Robin Johns could utilize in their legal arguments (101-102). The answer to this question is clearly outside the bounds of Sparks’s book, but he opens up an intriguing debate of the degree of a common Atlantic creole culture. The parties who made the rules of that culture (and perhaps 'rules' is too strong a term) might be irrelevant to the more fascinating issue of its existence and how it worked culturally and logistically.