the time the “Scramble for Africa” among European colonial powers began in the late nineteenth century, Africa had already been globally connected for centuries, Its gold had fueled the economies of Europe and the Islamic world for nearly a millennium, and the sophisticated kingdoms spanning its west coast had traded with Europeans since the fifteenth century.
Until at least, this was a trade of equals, using a variety of currenciesmost importantly, cowrie shells imported from the Maldives and nzimbu shells imported from Brazil.
But, as the slave trade grew, African kingdoms began to lose prominence in the growing global economy, We have been living with the effects of this shift ever since,
With A Fistful of Shells, Toby Green transforms our view of West and WestCentral Africa by reconstructing the world of these kingdoms, which revolved around trade, diplomacy, complex religious beliefs, and the production of art.
Green shows how the slave trade led to economic disparities that caused African kingdoms to lose relative political and economic power, The concentration of money in the hands of Atlantic elites in and outside these kingdoms brought about a revolutionary nineteenth century in Africa, parallel to the upheavals then taking place in Europe and America.
Yet political fragmentation following the fall of African aristocracies produced radically different results as European colonization took hold,
Drawing not just on written histories, but on archival research in nine countries, art, oral history, archaeology, and letters, Green lays bare the transformations that have shaped world politics and the global economy since the fifteenth century and paints a new and masterful portrait of West Africa, past and present.
This book is mindblowing. It is truly wonderful. The book I really needed to read,
Of course I knew that there were many African empires before and after European "discoveries" and I was well aware of the rich and diverse African cultures, but this book just filled so many blank spots of my understanding of precolonial history in West Africa and West Central Africa and how this distant past still shapes these regions today.
Whereas historical ethnographies and anthropology focused on single cultures and histories, this book does the contrary: it examines the linkages within West Africa and West Central Africa and even more importantly, with the rest of the world.
Green shows how well connected and integrated these parts of Africa were in the global economy, even long before the arrival of the Europeans, and how Africa contributed largely to world history.
Many other myths about the African precolonial past are expertly being refuted and replaced by a much better understanding of historical events, explaining not only why Africa did not take part in capital accumulation in spite of participating heavily in global trade and how this lead to an impoverishment of the continent, but also why there still is a deep distrust towards the state until today.
A Fistful of Shells is not the easiest read, The author focuses on patterns and general evolution, so the book hops from empire to empire, establishing links and combining evidence, It is full of anecdotes and historical evidence from a wide range of sources, Fun to read but at the same time very dense, It took me almost a month to finish it, The best overall history of West Africa I've ever read, It is rich in the what and the how and references great archival material to give an account that has been rarely given, Great. Whywell because he delves into the murky waters of explaining why the history played out as it did, finding causal links where none exist and coming off as trying to convince you of something he already believes that the tragedies that occurred there betweenandhave way more say on the realities of W.
Africa today than any other factors, Read it for the what and the how, ignore the why, All too often African history is treated as a topic either entirely divorced from the rest of global history or one that is entirely determined by forces beyond the continent.
Older scholarship notoriously labeled Africa a continent “without history” and even more recent studies have at times viewed it entirely through the lens of colonialism and the slave trade not allowing for any agency on the part of Africans themselves.
Obviously this is a very limited way of viewing an entire continents history lots happened in Africa before the arrival of Europeans and plenty happened there besides exploitative actions taken by those Europeans once they arrived.
I found Toby Greens book an engaging antidote to old fashioned views of African history that still persist in popular understanding of the continent,
A Fistful of Shells is primarily an economic history of West Africa from c,until c It covers a period dominated by the TransAtlantic Slave Trade but does not limit itself just to discussions of that topic, Instead the book takes an Africancentric perspective, examining how African powers and individuals were instrumental in shaping the political and economic changes that West Africa experienced during this period.
Greens primary argument is that far from being passive victims of European exploitation, Africans were instrumental in shaping their own environment,
Effectively making this argument requires Green to thread a delicate needle, Pushing it too far would risk arguing that Africans were primarily responsible for the slave trade and
later colonial exploitation, absolving the Europeans of responsibility for their actions.
Thankfully, I think Green does an excellent job at showing how Africans were actors in their own history, not strictly victims, but not freeing the Europeans for their exploitation of the continent.
I think a key part of this is the level of detail Green engages with, showing that West Africa was a complex place with many individual actors some of whom benefited from trade with Europeans, including most notoriously the trade in humans, while others were victims.
A more class based perspective allows Green to show how African rulers in particular participated in exploitation along with the Europeans while many other people suffered, He also discusses the differences between African states that participated in the slave trade and those that, even if only for a time, refused to sell slaves to outsiders.
Green also makes the decision to not go into great detail about the horrors of the slave trade or what happened to African slaves once they reached America he is content that we understand the horrors of this practice and chooses to focus on Africa and the people who remained on the continent for the most part.
That is not to say that the enslaved experience is absent, just that if you are looking for a detailed study of TransAtlantic Slavery this is not that book.
Greens interest range much further and in many ways it was his handling of other trades, such as in gold or cloth, that I found even more interesting.
This is because while I was obviously aware of the slave trade and the greater nuance that Green provided was interesting, I was almost entirely ignorant of these other trades.
A key theme of Greens book is how the trade with West Africa was primarily extractive it removed resources of long term value such as gold or humans from the continent in exchange for resources that had shorter value, such as cloth or other materials that would decay.
This line of argument while interesting is harder to follow I think and is one of Greens weaker points, Im far from a specialist and wouldnt be comfortable critiquing the overall argument, but I just found it hard to fully understand the details,
This argument is interconnected with broader points about how in West Africa multiple types of currency were often in use simultaneously, Green uses this argument to show the economic complexity of the region and to push back against older histories that saw Africa as a “barter economy” without real understanding of money.
Green provides very valuable nuance to our understanding of the complex economics of West African trade, but I think it also complicates his other argument about the role of extractive trade imbalance between Africa and the rest of the world.
It doesnt undermine it so much as make it harder to follow and after finishing I felt that there was much greater depth to this line of thinking that I just didnt fully grasp.
Instead, what I found most revelatory about A Fistful of Shells was how it showed the interconnectedness of West Africa, Europe, and North America in this period.
Green shows how material trade was an important linking factor, but he doesnt limit himself to just that, Instead he covers the transmission of ideas, perhaps most intriguingly in how the Haitian Revolution potentially inspired popular revolts in West Africa against an increasingly unpopular aristocracy made wealthy off the slave trade, and the sustained diplomatic connections between West African political entities and European powers.
The role of African embassies to Europe and Brazil are particularly interesting and show a very different perspective on AfricanEuropean relations than we usually see in popular discussions of this period.
Far from being isolated from the rest of the world, Green shows that Africa was deeply connected to European and North American trends and not just as a receiver but also as an influencer.
As a result I think A Fistful of Shells shows the flaws in approaching a history of Europe during this period without considering the role Africa and African powers played in culture and trade.
It was African gold that sustained many European monarchies and wars, for example, History books often emphasise the establishing of trade links to India by the Portuguese and the American colonies of the Spanish, but the African trade which was significantly enhanced during this period feels equally important and was integrated with the two, for example Indian cotton was a common trade good in West Africa.
While I found Greens book to be a little long and in places a bit slow, the content within was absolutely fascinating and did a lot to change my perspective on African history and my broader understanding of global history.
I think even just reading part of it could do a lot to expand anyones understanding of the development of global trade in the early modern period and I would definitely recommend it as an introduction to the subject.
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