Portal:Netherlands/Selected article/7

The Treaty of Butre was concluded between the Netherlands and Ahanta and signed at Butre, Gold Coast on 27 August 1656. The treaty regulated the jurisdiction of the Netherlands and the Dutch West India Company over the town of Butre and the surrounding country of Upper Ahanta, factually creating a Dutch protectorate over the area, which would last until the Dutch departure from the Gold Coast in April 1872.

The country of Ahanta, in what is now the Western Region of the Republic of Ghana, constituted a regional power in the form of a confederacy of chiefdoms which had come in early contact with the European nations settling on the Gold Coast for the purpose of trade.

In the middle of the seventeenth century the two European competitors in the area were the Dutch West India Company and the Swedish Africa Company. The European powers allied themselves with African states and chiefs in order to gain a sustainable upper hand. In this case the African allies were the Ahanta chiefdoms on the one hand and the state of Encasser, a political entity of which little is known, on the other.