formal and informal empire».68 It facilitated trading contacts and provided a means of signalling «achievement, hard work, worthiness and in some cases high birth».69 It provided an important thread in the racial and national politics of the colony, with many members of the National Congress of West Africa being freemasons. Closely related to race is the role of freemasonry in the formation of national identity. For example, in Britain freemasonry was a powerful expression of the Hanoverian settlement,70while by contrast in France it was in the 1870s one of the forces behind the development of modern French republicanism.71 The interaction between freemasonry, race, nationality and class is powerfully


illustrated by a classic study by Abner Cohen of freemasonry in Sierra Leone, which is a model of how scholarly research into freemasonry should be performed.72 Cohen found that in 1971 there were seventeen masonic lodges in Freetown, with about two thousand members, the bulk of whom were African. Most of these black masons were Creoles, descendants of the slaves emancipated between the 1780s and 1850s, a literate, highly-educated and occupationally-differentiated group, who were at first befriended but then disparaged by the British administrators. Cohen found that one in three Creoles were masons. Cohen related the Creole involvement in freemasonry to attacks on Creole power during the period from 1947. He concluded that «Largely without any conscious policy or design, Freemasonic rituals and organisation helped articulate an informal organisation, which helped the Creoles to protect their position in the face of political threat».73


Social Networks Cohen’s study raises one final important theme, that of social networks. As scholars have increasingly explored the pluralistic nature of social identity, the importance of the analysis of social networks has become evident. Factors such as the extent to which everybody knows everyone else («reachability»), the different ways in which people are linked («multiplexity») and the obligations placed by networks on their members («intensity») are essential in understanding local societies, and freemasonry and other


Coast”, in: J. F. Ade Ajayi and J. D. Y. Peel, People and Empires in African History: Essays in Memory of Michael


Crowder, London: Longman 1992, pp. 143-60. 68 Ibid., p. 146. 69 Ibid., p. 156. 70 David Stevenson, “James Anderson (1679-1739), Man and Mason”, in: Weisberger, McLeod and Morris, op.


cit., pp. 199-242; John Money, “Freemasonry and the Fabric of Loyalism in Hanoverian England”, in: Eckhart Helmuth (ed.), The Transformation of Political Culture: England and Germany in the late Eighteenth Century,


Oxford: Oxford University Press 1990, pp. 235-74. 71 Avner Halpern, The Democratisation of France 1840-1901: Sociabilité, Freemasonry and Radicalism, London:


Minerva Press 1999; Nord, op. cit., pp. 15-30. 72 Abner Cohen, “The Politics of Ritual Secrecy”, Man 6 (September 1971), pp. 427-48, reprinted in Edward A. Tiryakian, On the Margin of the Visible: Sociology, the Esoteric and the Occult, New York: John Wiley 1974, pp.


111-139. 73 Ibid., p. 129.


112


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