Innovational Eclecticism: The Asante Empire and Europe in the Nineteenth Century

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Abstract
It is axiomatic to the expansion of Europe, informal or otherwise, that the perpetrators of that expansion—explorers, officials, missionaries et al.—brought to the societies they infiltrated the ideas, concepts, technology and prejudices of their own cultures. This was a process, which, by definition, encompassed great variations in its penetrative power, dependent as it was on frequently intermittent contact dictated by policy, opportunity, necessity, and numerous other factors. Cultural borrowing on the part of the recipient polity is often seen as mere technological osmosis, the acquisition of more efficient military techniques and weaponry, and the indiscriminate consumption of the externals of European life in the guise of ‘trade goods’. To rest our conclusions here does a considerable disservice to the subtlety of such contacts.

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