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WEBSITE: http://www.toby-green.com/
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NATIONALITY: British
LAST VOLUME: CANR 209
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PERSONAL
Born 1974, in London, England; married; wife’s name Emily; children: Lily, Flora.
EDUCATION:University of Cambridge, degree in philosophy, 1996; University of Birmingham, Centre of West African Studies, Ph.D., 2007.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Historian, travel writer, educator. Formerly worked as a literary agent; King’s College London, Senior Lecturer in Lusophone African History and Culture, 2010-.
AWARDS:Nominated for Thomas Cook Travel Book of the Year award and Guardian First Book Award, both 1999, both for Saddled with Darwin; K. Blundell Trust Award, British Society of Authors; postdoctoral research fellowship, British Academy, Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham; Philip Leverhulme Prize in History, 2017; Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding, 2019, for A Fistful of Shells.
WRITINGS
Contributor of book reviews to periodicals.
SIDELIGHTS
Toby Green began his career as a literary agent and the author of travel books, although his third book, Thomas More’s Magician: A Novel Account of Utopia in Mexico, presents a departure, being a hybrid of biography, philosophy, and satire. In Green’s first book, Saddled with Darwin: A Journey through South America, he retraces the route Charles Darwin took in South America as part of his voyage on the Beagle in 1831. That trip provided much of the information for Darwin’s seminal work On the Origin of Species. Although Green could have used modern travel methods such as a bus, he decided to make the trip by horseback, despite the fact that he had never ridden a horse. Writing in the Times Literary Supplement, Nicola Walker pointed out that this decision “adds, of course, to the picaresque undertaking as well as testifying to his utter foolhardiness, courage and luck.”
Green, who also traveled on foot at times, retraces Darwin’s route as best he can. Nevertheless, some sections of the original route are no longer accessible, such as a road Darwin traveled through Chile’s Rio Tingiririca, which now lies under a man-made lake. As expected, Green encounters many other changes in South America, including a tremendous amount of urban growth and its associated effects on the environment, animals, and indigenous peoples and cultures. Green does, however, encounter the famous South American cowboys, called gauchos, who have survived the changes in South America and help house and feed Green for parts of his journey.
Writing in Nature, Andrew Berry questioned Green’s decision to follow Darwin’s route and noted that he does “himself a disservice in harnessing himself to Darwin—perhaps an unfair one. Darwin’s spare, analytical prose contrasts strongly with Green’s, which is marked by overblown descriptive passages.” Nevertheless, Barry noted, “Green’s account of the people he met on the way is a delight.” Although Walker also did not like Green’s “propensity for purple prose,” the reviewer noted that the author places much of his story “within a well-informed historical context.” Walker also commented: “If Toby Green should take up the reins again, his story will be worth watching out for.”
In Meeting the Invisible Man: Secrets and Magic in West Africa, Green once again takes an improbable journey, this time to track down West African mystics who supposedly know the secrets of invisibility and invulnerability. Green travels to Guinea-Bissau and meets up with his friend, Senegalese photographer El Hadji, who told Green during his previous trip to the area in 1995 about people with magical powers. With Hadji as his guide, Green journeys to out-of-the-way settlements in the African bush country as he tries to satisfy his aroused curiosity about the “marabouts,” who are considered to be the keepers of ancient knowledge. Throughout the book, Green encounters marabouts and others who, for one reason or another, no longer have magical powers or are unable to demonstrate them to him. Finally, after overcoming a wide range of dangers and setbacks, including smugglers, sickness, and long stretches of boredom, Green meets a marabout just in time to save him from a knife attack. Writing in African Business, reviewer Stephen Williams thought the book “could have used some literary editing, it is simply way too long.” Deborah L. Manzolillo was more favorably impressed, commenting in the Times Literary Supplement: “Although Green demythologizes the romance of the trip, his book is hard to put down.”
In Thomas Moore’s Magician, Green uses the travel genre as a vehicle for a hybrid of biography and utopian narrative. His subject is the Spanish jurist Vasco de Quiroga, who used British theologian Thomas Moore’s Utopia as a blueprint for founding a series of communes in Mexico in the sixteenth century, the only time an attempt was made to realize a political manifesto prior to the Russian Revolution of 1917. While recreating Quiroga’s life and the atmosphere of these utopias, Green questions what chance there is of a similar level of political idealism existing in the twenty-first century.
Inquisition: The Reign of Fear is an analysis of how and why the Spanish Inquisition took hold in 1478 and endured for three centuries, spreading from Europe to the Americas before being abolished by papal decree in 1834 following Napoleon’s deposition of the Spanish king in 1808. The Inquisition was, nominally, a means of ensuring the purity of the Roman Catholic Church and punishing any corruption of belief. But as Green argues, the Inquisition was more a political tool than a religious one. Though the church, in medieval Europe, had run inquisitions and executed those considered heretics or witches, the Spanish Inquisition differed in important ways. It was operated by the Spanish government without express papal approval; indeed, the Vatican often criticized the Inquisition for extremism. The Spanish Inquisition had a goal that was essentially political: it aimed to create, and maintain, a cohesive national identity at a time when Spain had become politically fragmented. To forge a strong national identity as a Christian state, the Inquisition began persecuting those it deemed to be insufficiently Catholic and therefore insufficiently patriotic. First it targeted conversos, Spaniards who had converted to from Judaism. It went on to persecute those of Muslim origin, as well as anyone suspected of disloyalty to the state. Individuals were encouraged to report suspects to the authorities; victims were tortured into making confessions and were burned to death in public—an execution euphemistically called “relaxing” the victim. It was not unknown for individuals to hand over others on bogus charges, either to get at their money or to exact revenge for a personal grudge. As the book’s subtitle makes clear, the Inquisition created a climate of terror, in which the entire public lived in fear of denunciation.
Reviewers admired Inquisition for its thorough research and its insightful analysis. London Independent writer Peter Stanford described the book as a “masterful account of arguably the longest running reign of terror in human history.” Green’s account, Stanford went on to say, is “rich in detail and individual cases, broad in scope, taking in the export of torture, paranoia and hypocrisy to the burgeoning colonial empire, and firmly rooted in a clear account of Spain’s place in European history.” Another Independent reviewer, Frank McLynn, also noted the effectiveness of Green’s writing, calling the author’s prose “full of Swiftian savage indignation about [the Inquisition’s] excesses.” Ian Pindar, writing in the London Guardian, observed that “Green appears to be using the Inquisition to comment obliquely on the ‘war on terror’”—a point brought up by other commentators as well, who noted the parallels Green draws between the workings of the Inquisition and twentieth-century fascism. While many reviewers found these parallels convincing and relevant, Englewood Review of Books contributor Mark Eckel argued that “there is a huge difference between the Inquisition … and the worldwide results of totalitarian dictatorship.” The workings of the Inquisition, in his view, were a distortion of doctrine, effected by a minority, while modern totalitarianism drew its power from group adherence to ideology. Equating the Spanish Inquisition with “with murderous East German stasi or Mao Zedong’s killing fields,” said Eckel, “is a memorial insult to hundreds of millions” who were victims of this political ideology.
In Green’s 2019 work, A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade of the Age of Revolution, the author draws on oral history, archival research, archaeology, and letters to demonstrate five centuries of West African and West-Central African history, from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries. This timeline takes the reader from before until after the slave trade. Long before the arrival of Europeans, as Green shows in his study, this region had formed not only political and religious connections, but also economic ones. Trading took place in precious commodities such as gold, pearls, and cloth, among other items. Far from being the backward region that became accepted knowledge in the West, Green demonstrates that it was actually composed of “kingdoms that were cosmopolitan, economically advanced and culturally sophisticated, trading far and wide with the West and beyond in a variety of currencies – including the cowrie shells from which the book takes its name,” according to a contributor for the British Academy website. With the onset of the slave trade, almost all areas of this region were affected, leading to huge disparities in wealth between the ruling classes and their subject populations; it also developed the militarization of these African states. Eventually, this led, in the nineteenth century, to revolts against such established rulers.
Winner of the 2019 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize, A Fistful of Shells earned praise from many quarters. As reported in the online Publishing Perspectives, the jury chief of the Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize, Ash Amin, noted: “A Fistful of Shells is a treasure trove of a book. Truly ground-breaking, it draws on years of work to tell another story of pre-colonial West Africa, a continually ignored continent. … Finally, a detailed history that few westerners know but all ought to. Quite simply, an eye-opener.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer similarly termed it a “valuable history, … written in an accessible style,” while London Spectator contributor Anthony Sattin called it a “rich and insightful work.” Similarly, London Guardian Online writer Padraic Scanlan felt that Green “dismantles the racist myth of west African ‘backwardness’.” Scanlan added: “He shows that the inequalities that made the European ‘scramble for Africa’ possible grew out of a catastrophe, the path to which began in the 15th century.” Likewise, New Statesman Online contributor David Olusoga dubbed A Fistful of Shells a “stunning work of research and argumentation.” Olusoga went on to comment: “It has the potential to become a landmark in our understanding of the most misunderstood of continents.” Further praise came from Times Higher Education Online writer Ruth Finnegan, who found A Fistful of Shells a “remarkable book.” Finnegan added: “For all its impressive scholarship A Fistful of Shells is notably readable, supported by great illustrations and a stunning cover – and, in the best sense, personal. … This really is a ‘groundbreaking’ work.”
Green once told CA: “My early inspiration was to try to fuse my philosophical studies with the world I found in my travels. In my first two travel books, written during my mid-twenties, I used my journeys as ways of exploring ideas including evolution and the origins of modern forms of racism. Placing my experience of travel in far- flung places in an historical context has inevitably given me an increasing interest in world history, and, whereas in my twenties I was interested in describing how the world was, I now want to write about how the world became the way it is today. This is why I have embarked on a Ph.D. program linking the history of West Africa and Latin America, in parallel to my literary career.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
African Business, October, 2001, Stephen Williams, review of Meeting the Invisible Man: Secrets and Magic in West Africa, p. 49.
Booklist, March 1, 2009, Gilbert Taylor, review of Inquisition: The Reign of Fear, p. 9.
Globe & Mail (Toronto, Canada), October 16, 1999, review of Saddled with Darwin: A Journey through South America, p. 22.
Guardian (London, England), August 25, 2007, Ian Pindar, review of Inquisition.
History Today, April 1, 2008, Peter Furtado, review of Inquisition, p. 65.
Independent (London, England), July 1, 2007, Peter Stanford, review of Inquisition; July 6, 2007, Frank McLynn, review of Inquisition.
Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2009, review of Inquisition.
Library Journal, January 1, 2009, Diane Harvey, review of Inquisition, p. 97.
Nature, August 26, 1999, Andrew Berry, review of Saddled with Darwin, pp. 831-832.
Publishers Weekly, February 11, 2019, review of A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade of the Age of Revolution, p. 61.
Spectator, May 22, 2004, Sandy Balfour, review of Thomas More’s Magician: A Novel Account of Utopia in Mexico, p. 46; January 26, 2019, Anthony Sattin, “In the Realms of Gold,” review of A Fistful of Shells, p. 30.
Times Literary Supplement (London, England), July 30, 1999, Nicola Walker, review of Saddled with Darwin, p. 32; October 26, 2001, Deborah L. Manzolillo, review of Meeting the Invisible Man.
Utopian Studies, winter, 2005, Lynn Walford, review of Thomas More’s Magician, p. 137.
ONLINE
African Business Online, April 12, 2019, Stephen Williams, “Back to the Future,” review of A Fistful of Shells.
British Academy, https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/ (December 15, 2019), “Toby Green.”
Englewood Review of Books, http://erb.kingdomnow.org/ (November 11, 2009), Mark Eckel, review of Inquisition.
Kings College London, https://www.kcl.ac.uk/ (December 15, 2019), “Toby Green.”
London Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/ (March 8, 2019), Padraic Scanlan, review of A Fistful of Shells.
New Statesman, https://www.newstatesman.com/ (January 30, 2019 ), David Olusoga, review of A Fistful of Shells.
Nontheist Nexus, http: //nontheistnexus.com/ (November 11, 2009), review of Inquisition.
School of History and Cultures, University of Birmingham, http:// www.historycultures.bham.ac.uk/ (November 11, 2009), Green faculty profile.
Toby Green, http://www.toby-green.com (December 15, 2019).*
Times Higher Education, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/ (April 4, 2019), Ruth Finnegan, review of A Fistful of Shells.
Toby Green is the author of a diverse body of work, and his work has been translated into a dozen languages. He worked as a teacher, literary agent and journalist before becoming an academic specializing in the history of precolonial West Africa, and he is now Senior Lecturer in Lusophone African History and Culture at King's College London.
Green's first major historical work was Inquisition: The Reign of Fear (Macmillan, 2007; Thomas Dunne, 2009), and this was followed by The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300-1589 (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and most recently the prize-winning book A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (Allen Lane/Chicago University Press, 2019). Awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in History in 2017, Green is also the author of a biography of the first Bishop of Michoacan in Mexico, Thomas More's Magician (2004, Weidenfeld & Nicolson); of the novels Imaginary Crimes (2013) and Colombian Roulette (2016), both published by Mkuki na Nyota; and of two early travel books, Saddled with Darwin (1999) and Meeting the Invisible Man (2001).
Beyond ongoing writing projects, Green's work today encompasses the research of early African history and public access to it. In the UK he developed a new A level option with the OCR A level board, "African Kingdoms: 1400-1800", which launched in 2015 (see www.africankingdoms.co.uk); he is co-ordinating editor of a new team-written coursebook for West African secondary schoolchildren, alongside historians from Fourah Bay College (Sierra Leone), Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (Ghana), Michigan State University, and the National Centre for Arts and Culture (The Gambia), which is freely available to download across the continent from an eplatform at https:///wasscehistorytextbook.wordpress.com.
Influences
Toby Green's outlook is shaped by his experiences in different parts of the world. As part of his work he has spent extended periods living and researching in Banjul, Bissau, Bogota, Lima, Lisbon, Madrid, Mexico City, Praia, Santiago de Chile, and Seville. He has also worked intensively in recent years with academic colleagues in Angola, Brazil, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Sierra Leone and The Gambia. His work has been profoundly affected by his doctoral supervisor, the Brazilian scholar of Timbuktu and Songhay, P.F. de Moraes Farias, and by his long-time collaborator and friend, the South African screenwriter and comic book expert Ian L. Rakoff.
He is also deeply influenced by the interconnected cultural forms of West Africa and Latin America, and this has led to the coorganisation of workshops bringing together historians and musicians from West Africa.
Toby Green
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For the Australian rules footballer, see Toby Greene.
Toby Green is a British historian who is a Senior Lecturer in Lusophone African History and Culture at King's College London. He obtained his Doctor of Philosophy in African studies at the University of Birmingham. He is Chair of the Fontes Historiae Africanae Committee of the British Academy, and has written extensively about African early modern history and colonial African slavery, mainly focussed on slavery in the Portuguese colonies.
He has also written on the Spanish Inquisition. Green disagrees with the notion of a Black Legend of the Spanish Inquisition and often quotes sixteenth-century sources regarding the institution's abuse of power in Latin America, and is often cited regarding this subject. He has other publications regarding the issues of religious prosecution and oppression in Africa and other European colonies. His interests are slavery in the Atlantic and cultural and economic links between America and Africa.[1]
His book A Fistful of Shells won the 2019 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding.[2]
Contents
1
Views on the Spanish Inquisition
2
Publications
2.1
Articles
2.2
Major books (selected only)
3
Further reading
4
References
Views on the Spanish Inquisition[edit]
Green addresses the Spanish Inquisition mainly through Hispano-American sources. He notes that the great unchecked power given to inquisitors meant that they were "widely seen as above the law"[3] and sometimes had motives for imprisoning and sometimes executing alleged offenders other than for the purpose of punishing religious nonconformity, mainly in Hispanoamerica and Iberoamerica.[3][4][5]
Publications[edit]
Articles[edit]
Baculamento or Encomienda?: Legal Pluralisms and the Contestation of Power in Pan-Atlantic World of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Green, T. 28 Sep 2017 In : Journal of Global Slavery. 2, p. 310-336
“Africa and the Price Revolution: Currency Imports and Socioeconomic Change in West And West-Central Africa During the 17th Century”, Journal of African History, 57/1 (2016), 1-24.
“Beyond an Imperial Atlantic: Trajectories of Africans From Upper Guinea and West-Central Africa in the Early Atlantic World", Past and Present 230 (Feb 2016), 91-122
“Beyond an Imperial Atlantic: Trajectories of Africans From Upper Guinea and West-Central Africa in the Early Atlantic World", Past and Present 230 (Feb 2016), 91-122
Brokers of Change: Atlantic Commerce and Cultures in Pre-Colonial Western Africa (Oxford University Press, for the British Academy: 2012)
“Building Slavery in the Atlantic World: Atlantic Connections and the Changing Institution of Slavery in Cabo Verde, 15th-16th Centuries”, Slavery and Abolition 32/2, 2011, 227-45:
Major books (selected only)[edit]
Saddled with Darwin: A Journey through South America on Horseback (1999) ISBN 0571248284
Meeting the Invisible Man: Secrets and Magic in West Africa (2001) ISBN 978-0297646150
Thomas More’s Magician: A Novel Account of Utopia in Mexico (2004) ISBN 0753819783
The Inquisition: The Reign of Fear (2007) ISBN 978-0330443357
The Rise of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa (2012)ISBN 978-1107634718
A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (2019) ISBN 9780226644578
Toby Green has worked widely with academics, musicians and writers across Africa, organising events in collaboration with institutions in Angola, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique Sierra Leone and the Gambia. He has written a number of previous books, and his work has been translated into twelve languages. Awarded a 2017 Philip Leverhulme Prize in History, he is Senior Lecturer in Lusophone African History and Culture at King's College London. His 2019 book A Fistful of Shells won the Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for global cultural understanding and was shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize and the inaugural Pius Adesanmi Memorial Award.
1 October 2019
'A Fistful of Shells' by Dr Toby Green shortlisted for prestigious awards
‘A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution’ by Dr Toby Green has been shortlisted for the Nayef Al- Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding and the Cundill History Prize for 2019.
A Fistful of Shells by Toby Green
A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution, by Senior Lecturer in Lusophone African History and Culture Dr Toby Green, has been shortlisted for two distinguished global literary awards.
In the book, Toby Green changes our view of West and West-Central Africa by reconstructing the world of these kingdoms, which revolve around trade, diplomacy, complex religious beliefs, and the production of art. He brings into focus the region's central place in shaping the modern world before European sabotage, as well as the powerful and also complicated legacy of this now. The book was hailed by critics including David Olusoga in the New Statesman and Ben Okri in the Daily Telegraph and the Financial Times.
A Fistful of Shells is the fruit of research conducted in the archives of nine nations and required the author to undertake fieldwork across eight West African states. It shows. [...] This is a stunning work of research and argumentation. It has the potential to become a landmark in our understanding of the most misunderstood of continents.
– David Olusoga, New Statesman (Source: Penguin Books)
A Fistful of Shells has been shortlisted for the Nayef Al- Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding, an annual £25,000 prize awarded by the British Academy to a non-fiction book which contributes to public understanding of world cultures. The other shortlisted writers are Kwame Anthony Appiah, Julian Baggini, Julia Lovell, Seema Malhotra, and Ed Morales. The book has also been shortlisted for the 2019 Cundill History Prize, run by McGill University in Canada, which has the largest purse in the world for a book of non-fiction in English; it is on a shortlist of 8 books for a prize awarded annually to the book that represents historical scholarship, originality and literary quality.
Selecting a handful of books for the shortlist from the many excellent titles submitted was a challenge, as we balanced vibrancy of prose against depth of research, global perspectives against hidden lives. But two themes stood out for me in our selections. The first is the originality of the approaches each author took, and their collective eagerness to widen our lens on the past. The second is the contemporary resonance of the stories told and the analyses presented — proving, once again, that today has been irrevocably shaped by yesterday.”
– Juror Charlotte Gray (Source: Cundill Prize)
About Dr Toby Green
Dr Toby Green joined King's College London in 2010 after studying for his PhD at the Centre of West African Studies at Birmingham University. He was recipient of a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award in 2015, as well as a Philip Leverhulme Prize for History in 2017. His research interests include the history of West of Africa, Atlantic slavery and Trans-Saharan and Trans-Atlantic Diasporas.
1 November 2019
The British Academy names 'A Fistful of Shells' winner of 2019 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize
Previously shortlisted, Dr Toby Green is awarded the prestigious £25,000 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding for his book 'A Fistful of Shells' by the British Academy.
Congratulations to historian, Dr Toby Green who was announced as the winner of the British Academy's 2019 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding for his book, 'A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the rise of the slave trade to the age of revolution'.
The announcement was made at a British Academy ceremony in London, where Dr Green was announced as the winner of the £25,000 prize, which since 2013 is awarded annually to a non-fiction book. The prize celebrates books which illuminate the interconnections between distinct cultures.
In his critically acclaimed book, Dr Green changes readers view of West and West- Central Africa by reconstructing the world of these kingdoms which revolve around trade, diplomacy, complex religious beliefs, and the production of art. The book draws on many years of research across nine countries shedding light on pre-colonial Africa and bringing into focus the regions central place in shaping the modern Western world.
A Fistful of Shells is a treasure trove of a book. Truly ground-breaking, it draws on years of work to tell another story of pre-colonial West Africa, a continually ignored continent. It changed the way in which the jury thought about Africa and helped us to better understand not just Africa but the way in which the world is changing right now. Finally, a detailed history that few westerners know but all ought to. Quite simply, an eye-opener.
– Professor Ash Amin FBA, Juror (Source: The British Academy)
Dr Green was chosen from a shortlist of six writers, and prior to the award, his book on publication was simultaneously met with critical acclaim by critics David Olusoga in the New Statesman and Ben Okri in the Daily Telegraph and the Financial Times.
I am thrilled, and humbled, that A Fistful of Shells has been awarded this prize, so beautifully conceived by Professor Nayef Al-Rodhan. Beyond any personal feelings of mine, however, the award is testament to the work done by the British Academy in Africa, and to the significance of the history of Africa in the past, the present and the future.
– Dr Toby Green, Senior Lecturer in Lusophone African History and Culture at King's
Dr Green joined King's College London in 2010 as Senior Lecturer in Lusophone African History and Culture in the Departments of History and SPLAS. He previously held fellowships from the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust, and in 2015 he was the recipient of a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award. He has worked widely with academics, musicians and writers across Africa, organising events in collaboration with institutions in Angola, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone and the Gambia. He has written several highly influential books, some of which have been translated into twelve languages.
I’m absolutely delighted with the news that Toby Green’s exciting, innovative research on the history of west Africa has been recognised by the award of the Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding. This is a marvellous achievement and very well deserved.
– Professor Abigail Woods, Head of Department of History
A Fistful of Shells is available to purchase online at Penguin Books. For further information about the prize, please see the official announcement by the British Academy.
QUOTE:
"A Fistful of Shells is a treasure trove of a book. Truly ground-breaking, it draws on years of work to tell another story of pre-colonial West Africa, a continually ignored continent. ... Finally, a detailed history that few westerners know but all ought to. Quite simply, an eye-opener."
Toby Green’s History of West Africa Wins £25,000 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize
In News by Porter AndersonOctober 31, 2019Leave a Comment
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In what Ash Amin says ‘changed the way in which the jury thought about Africa,’ Toby Green’s book revisits the 18th- and 19th-century center of the slave trade.
Toby Green. Image: Provided by Nayan Al-Rodhan Prize
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
Cannadine: ‘Subjects of Enormous Importance’
I
n its annual awards ceremony at the British Academy on Thursday evening (October 30), Toby Green has won the Nayan Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding, besting five competitors in the program’s 2019 shortlist.
A Fistful of Shells: West Africa From the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution is published in the UK by Penguin Books’ Allen Lane imprint.
The £25,000 purse (US$32,373), according to prize organizers, recognizes the British historian’s book’s work in dispelling long-held myths that African history only began with the arrival of the Europeans in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Green’s study draws on years of research in nine countries and on oral histories, maps, letters, artifacts, and the author’s experience of collecting material in eight West African states to develop a new perspective on pre-colonial Africa.
Green is a senior lecturer at King’s College London and takes his title from what he argues was one of the currencies, cowrie shell, of African coastal regions.
A Fistful of Shells follows Green’s other major works of history including The Rise of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and The Inquisition: The Reign of Fear (Pan Macmillan, 2007).
In a statement of rationale on the award, jury chief Ash Amin, CBE FBA, is quoted, saying, “A Fistful of Shells is a treasure trove of a book. Truly ground-breaking, it draws on years of work to tell another story of pre-colonial West Africa, a continually ignored continent.
“It changed the way in which the jury thought about Africa and helped us to better understand not just Africa but the way in which the world is changing right now. Finally, a detailed history that few westerners know but all ought to. Quite simply, an eye-opener.
“It was a very demanding task to separate the many merits of all the books on this year’s shortlist. Each one was the culmination of years of dedication and represents an illuminating contribution to global cultural understanding.”
And British Academy president David Cannadine, is quoted saying, “This prize, which is generously supported by Nayef Al-Rodhan, celebrates books that open up new records of global cultural history and tackle the many influences involved in molding modern cultural identities.
“I’ve been hugely encouraged by the international scope of this year’s shortlist, which tackles subjects of enormous importance to those working to foster tolerance and mutual learning, amid all our differences.
“On behalf of the British Academy, I would like to congratulate Toby Green on the masterful achievement that A Fistful of Shells represents for his work, for those in his field of global African history, and for global cultural understanding.”
On publication, A Fistful of Shells was met with critical acclaim. In his New Statesman review historian, writer and broadcaster, David Olusoga wrote: “This is a stunning work of research and argumentation. It has the potential to become a landmark in our understanding of the most misunderstood of continents.”
Toby Green, who is leading a Global South Writing Workshop in Mozambique at the time of the award ceremony in London, will receive a cheque for £25,000.
As Publishing Perspectives readers will recall, the shortlist for this year’s Al-Rodhan Prize, in addition to Green’s book, included:
The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity by Kwame Anthony Appiah (USA), Profile
How the World Thinks: A Global History of Philosophy by Julian Baggini (UK), Granta Books
Maoism: A Global History by Julia Lovell (UK), The Bodley Head
Remnants of Partition: 21 Objects from a Continent Divided by Aanchal Malhotra (India), Hurst
Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture by Ed Morales (USA), Verso
As media material describes the prize, “The Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize was established in 2013, to reward and celebrate the best works of non-fiction that demonstrate rigor and originality, have contributed to global cultural understanding and illuminate the interconnections and divisions that shape cultural identity worldwide.”
To be eligible for entry this year, books had to be works of nonfiction published between March 1 of last year and March 31 of this year. Authors may be of any nationality, based anywhere in the world, and working in any language provided that the nominated work is available in the English language.
The last four winners were Kapka Kassabova for Border A Journey to the Edge of Europe (2018); Timothy Garton Ash for Free Speech (2017), Professor Carole Hillenbrand for Islam: A New Historical Introduction (2016), and Dr Neil MacGregor for A History of the World in 100 Objects and Germany: Memories of a Nation (2015).
The Award’s Nayef Al-Rodhan
The award’s sponsor Al-Rodhan is an honorary fellow at St. Antony’s Oxford, and program director with the Geopolitics and Global Futures Program at the Geneva Center for Security Policy.
His own writings include Emotional Amoral Egoism (LIT Verlag, 2008); Neo-Statecraft and Meta-Geopolitics (LIT Verlag, 2009); Politics of Emerging Strategic Technologies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); and The Role of the Arab-Islamic World in the Rise of the West: Implications for Contemporary Trans-Cultural Relations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
Al-Rodhan’s site is called Sustainable History. The prize now “for Global Cultural Understanding,” was established in 2013 and originally was called the Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Transcultural Understanding. This will be its third year with the “Global Cultural Understanding” moniker.
Simon Winder of Penguin Random House UK accepts the 2019 Al-Rodhan Prize from Nayef Al-Rodhan on Toby Green’s behalf., as Ed Morales and Aanchal Malhotra look on. Image: Nayaf Al-Rodhan Prize, Lucy Williams
More from Publishing Perspectives on publishing and book award programs is here, and more from us on the Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize is here.
r Toby Green
Academics Affiliates
Senior Lecturer in Lusophone African History and Culture
Contact details
toby.green@kcl.ac.uk
+44 (0)20 7848 1741
Biography
After studying Philosophy, Toby Green worked as a writer and editor, publishing various books that have been translated into 12 languages. He then studied for his PhD at the Centre of West African Studies at Birmingham University, working with Paulo de Moraes Farias and completing in 2007, before coming to King's in 2010.
After holding fellowships from the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust, in 2015 he was recipient of a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award. He has also been PI of research projects funded by the AHRC, British Library, European Union, and the Leverhulme Trust, and was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for History in 2017. He has organised events in collaboration with institutions in Angola, Brazil, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, and The Gambia.
Research Interests and PhD Supervision
I am primarily a historian of West Africa, and my work seeks to contribute towards a refocusing of the understanding of modern history by grasping the active roles of West Africans in shaping both global histories as well as local West African ones. As the roles of peoples from West Africa in developing new ideas in the early modern period have often been passed over by historians, one of my main aims is to re-balance this approach.
Working in the "Global North", I seek also to work actively to reorient the privileges of academic power through collaborating with colleagues in the "Global South". I am currently active in collaborative projects with colleagues in Brazil, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, and The Gambia.
My research interests are broadly structured around West African engagement with the early Atlantic world through a number of themes, including economic change, cultural transformations, and slavery.
Specific areas of interest include:
Trans-Saharan and Trans-Atlantic Diasporas
African economic history and its intersection with world economic history
Atlantic slavery
Creolization
Connections between the precolonial, the colonial and the postcolonial state in Africa
Cultural and economic links between Brazil and Africa, 16th-19th centuries
PhD supervision:
Recently completed:
Dorothee Boulanger: Fiction as History? Resistance, Compicities and the Intellectual History of Postcolonial Angola (2018)
Vincent Nadeau: Fideal and the Black Dove: African Origins of the Cuban Revolution (2019)
Ongoing:
Joseph da Costa: Empire and Environmental Thought: Portuguese Humanism and the Creation of Universal Categories in the 16th Century
Patrice Etienne: Ancient African History and its Dramatic Reception
Aleida Mendes Borges: Youth and Political Participation in the Lusophone World
Expertise and Public Engagement
Toby Green is the Lead Consultant for the new OCR A Level History Option "African Kingdoms, 1400-1800", having written the accompanying ebook, and is a member of the OCR Consultative Forum for History. He has written widely for the national press, and has reviewed for The Independent, The London Review of Books, the THES and the TLS. He is also lead coordinator of a new online textbook funded by the AHRC for West African schoolchildren for the WASSCE exam in History, working with a team of historians from Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and The Gambia.
He has participated in collaborative projects with institutions including the Anneaux de la Memoire (Nantes), the British Library, and the National Centre for Arts and Culture in The Gambia. He is Chair of the Fontes Historiae Africanae Committee of the British Academy, and the Honorary Treasurer of the African Studies Association of the UK (ASAUK).
Latest publications
North-South dynamics in academia 02 September 2019
A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution 22 March 2019
'Dubbing' precolonial Africa and the Atlantic diaspora: Historical knowledge and the Global South 29 January 2019
From Essentialisms to Pluralisms: New Directions in Precolonial West African History from the Oral History Archive at Fajara, The Gambia 31 August 2018
Landscapes, Sources and Intellectual Projects of the West African Past: Essays in Honour of PF de Moraes Farias 31 August 2018
Challenge or Opportunity? Postcolonialism and the Historian 20 August 2018
The challenge of studying inflation in precolonial Africa by Klas Rönnbäck - A response 01 June 2018
Pluralism, Violence and Empire: The Portuguese New Christians in the Atlantic World 31 March 2018
The Challenge of Studying Inflation in Precolonial Africa by Klas Rönnbäck: A Response 11 October 2017
Baculamento or Encomienda?: Legal Pluralisms and the Contestation of Power in Pan-Atlantic World of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries 28 September 2017
QUOTE:
"kingdoms that were cosmopolitan, economically advanced and culturally sophisticated, trading far and wide with the West and beyond in a variety of currencies – including the cowrie shells from which the book takes its name,"
‘A Fistful of Shells’ by Toby Green has been awarded the British Academy’s 2019 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding
News • 30 Oct 2019
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A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution by British historian Toby Green is today named the winner of the seventh Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding, the British Academy’s non-fiction book prize. The announcement was made at a ceremony at the British Academy in London.
In his critically acclaimed book, Toby Green tells the history of West Africa in a new light, dispelling the long-held myth that African history only began with the arrival of the Europeans in the 18th and 19th centuries. This comprehensive study draws on many years of research in nine countries, and on oral histories, maps, letters, artefacts and the author’s own experience of collecting material across eight West African states to create a new perspective on pre-colonial Africa, little-known in the western world.
In A Fistful of Shells, Green, who is a senior lecturer at King's College London, argues that there is much more to the history of West Africa than the history of slavery and abolition. The coastal regions of West Africa were far from closed, sedentary and ‘backward’ prior to the 18th and 19th centuries. Instead, they were composed of kingdoms that were cosmopolitan, economically advanced and culturally sophisticated, trading far and wide with the West and beyond in a variety of currencies – including the cowrie shells from which the book takes its name.
The product of over two decades of research and experience travelling in West Africa, A Fistful of Shells is published by Allen Lane and follows Toby Green’s other major works of history including The Rise of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa (2012) and The Inquisition: The Reign of Fear (2007).
Toby Green has worked with academics, musicians and writers across Africa, organising events in collaboration with institutions in Angola, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone and the Gambia, and his work has been translated into 12 languages. He played a leading role in developing the OCR’s new A Level History option, ‘African Kingdoms, 1400-1800’.
Commenting on behalf of the jury, Professor Ash Amin FBA said:
“A Fistful of Shells is a treasure trove of a book. Truly ground-breaking, it draws on years of work to tell another story of pre-colonial West Africa, a continually ignored continent. It changed the way in which the jury thought about Africa and helped us to better understand not just Africa but the way in which the world is changing right now. Finally, a detailed history that few westerners know but all ought to. Quite simply, an eye-opener.
“It was a very demanding task to separate the many merits of all the books on this year’s shortlist. Each one was the culmination of years of dedication and represents an illuminating contribution to global cultural understanding.”
Professor Sir David Cannadine, historian and President of the British Academy, added:
“This prize, which is generously supported by Professor Nayef Al-Rodhan, celebrates books that open up new records of global cultural history and tackle the many influences involved in moulding modern cultural identities. I have been hugely encouraged by the international scope of this year’s shortlist, which tackles subjects of enormous importance to those working to foster tolerance and mutual learning, amid all our differences. On behalf of the British Academy, I would like to congratulate Toby Green on the masterful achievement that A Fistful of Shells represents for his work, for those in his field of global African history, and for global cultural understanding.”
On publication, A Fistful of Shells was met with critical acclaim. In his New Statesman review historian, writer and broadcaster David Olusoga wrote:“This is a stunning work of research and argumentation. It has the potential to become a landmark in our understanding of the most misunderstood of continents.”
Toby Green, who is leading a Global South Writing Workshop in Mozambique at the time of the award ceremony in London, will receive a cheque for £25,000.
Professor Ash Amin was joined on the jury by historian and political scientist Professor Rana Mitter FBA; social anthropologist Dame Henrietta Moore FBA; cultural studies academic, writer and broadcaster Professor Patrick Wright FBA and author and broadcaster Madeleine Bunting.
A Fistful of Shells was chosen from a shortlist of six books: The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity by Kwame Anthony Appiah (Profile); How the World Thinks: A Global History of Philosophy by Julian Baggini (Granta Books); Maoism: A Global History by Julia Lovell (The Bodley Head); Remnants of Partition: 21 Objects from a Continent Divided by Aanchal Malhotra (Hurst) and Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture by Ed Morales (Verso).
The Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize was established in 2013 to reward and celebrate the best works of non-fiction that demonstrate rigour and originality, have contributed to global cultural understanding and illuminate the interconnections and divisions that shape cultural identity worldwide.
The last four winners were Kapka Kassabova for Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe (2018); Timothy Garton Ash for Free Speech (2017), Professor Carole Hillenbrand for Islam: A New Historical Introduction (2016), and Dr Neil MacGregor for A History of the World in 100 Objects and Germany: Memories of a Nation (2015).
QUOTE:
" valuable history, ... written in an accessible style,"
A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade of the Age of Revolution
Toby Green. Univ. of Chicago, $40 (640p) ISBN 978-0-226-64457-8
Historian Green (The Rise of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 7300-7589) won't disappoint scholarly readers with his dense latest. Covering five centuries, this meticulously researched book, based on archival research in nine countries, lays out a comprehensive overview of the economic history of "West Africa and West-Central Africa before and after the slave trade. Green enumerates the ways in which Africa had formed global economic and political connections long before the arrival of Europeans, trading gold, cloth, pearls, and other commodities. Gradually, these were replaced by trade in captives, so that by 1750, "almost every area in West and West-Central Africa was affected by trans-Atlantic and/or trans-Saharan slave trades." Green links the slave trade to the militarization of African states, the growing inequalities between African ruling classes and their populations, and 19th-century revolts against these established authorities "as people sloughed off the aristocracies that had emerged to prey on them in the preceding centuries." This valuable history, while written in an accessible style, covers so much historical and theoretical ground that it will be probably be appreciated more by Africanists than a general readership. (Apr.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade of the Age of Revolution." Publishers Weekly, 11 Feb. 2019, p. 61. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A575753381/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a9f19f81. Accessed 5 Dec. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A575753381
QUOTE:
"rich and insightful work."
A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution
by Toby Green
Allen Lane, 30 [pounds sterling], pp. 640
A thought kept recurring as I read Toby Green's fascinating and occasionally frustrating book on the development of West Africa from the 15th to 19th centuries: that the money in my pocket was just a piece of polypropylene. And what is that worth in the greater scheme of things?
The thought occured because money and its predecessor, barter goods, play a central role in the story Green has to tell in this monumental volume. The shells of the title are cowries, which for centuries were accepted as currency across the region. Cowries are not native to West Africa and had to be shipped from the Indian Ocean. But they worked as currency in the way polypropylene does: they had no absolute value but were accepted as currency because they were impossible to fake. West Africa had other commodities that could be used as currency and that appealed to Europeans. One was gold, the other humans.
West Africa's goldfields were already legendary in 1375, when a map of central Africa showed a king with a golden crown and sceptre, holding a pomegranate-sized nugget. This was Musa, the Mansa or King of Mali, who made one of the showiest entries ever on the pilgrimage to Mecca: his entire entourage was laden with gold and each of the 500 slaves who ran in front of him waved batons made from 2kg of gold.
It was recently estimated (by Time magazine) that Musa was the richest person who has ever lived, so he was clearly a significant figure. But that he is the most famous historical figure from West Africa until the 18th century or even later says more about how people in the West and elsewhere have written the region's pre-colonial history than it does about Musa's importance.
As Green explains, there were reasons for not telling that history, just as there were advantages in not recognising the legitimacy or even the existence of nations in West Africa, especially if you were Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, French or British and you wanted to trade or loot your way down the Atlantic coast. That this lack of historical record has not been corrected in our own time is depressing but not surprising. A Fistful of Shells attempts to rectify the situation by looking at economic, political, social and cultural development and, in the process, revealing the part these kingdoms played in the birth of our modern world.
Green previously worked as a journalist and a travel writer. Ten years ago he published a book about looking for mystics in West Africa, and since then he has been based at King's College London, where he is now senior lecturer in lusophone African history and culture. This book combines both stages of his life, drawing on decades of first-hand experience, research in archives and discussions in seminar rooms.
All this makes for a rich and insightful work, but occasionally also an unhappy mix. Above all, do not judge this long, dense book by its introduction. Had I not been reviewing it, I might not have read past the beginning, which is often confusing, both in its statements and in its timeline, and I wish that Green had worked some magic on his text and that his editors had cleaned up some of its many repetitions. But I am glad I persevered, for there is much fascination to be had beyond the opening pages.
'What,' Green asks, 'are the historical origins of African economic "underdevelopment"? How did African states change during this era?' And perhaps more interesting, was it by chance that the second half of the 18th century was a time of revolution in Europe, the Americas and Africa? His responses draw on a wide range of sources, from published histories, new statistics and first-hand travel accounts to fiction, poetry, traditional songs and newly discovered oral histories, much of which is revelatory.
What emerges is a radically different view of the region from the one that has been generally available. West Africa, according to Green, was both cosmopolitan in its outlook, culturally and politically sophisticated and in some ways globally connected long before Europeans arrived to 'civilise the natives'. Among the most surprising revelations is the discovery that Europeans were rarely instigators of trade along the Atlantic coast, or even inland. What they did was develop existing markets and then often flood them with produce. In this way, they wrested control of trade away from Africans while at the same time destroying the value of gold dust, slaves, cowrie shells and other local commodities, particularly in their exchange value against European imports such as iron bars (another form of currency in the region) and bolts of cloth. The more that West African states traded with Europeans, the poorer most of them became. By the 19th century, some countries knew how to resist these developments, but others found a growing number of people turning to Islam as 'a religion of struggle to resist inequality and the rising power of capitalism', which sowed the seeds for the current jihadi unrest in the region.
Green concludes by pointing to the lack of history being taught in schools and universities in West Africa and elsewhere; if it is taught at all, it tends to focus on the slave trade. A Fistful of Shells shows that there was so much more, and of so much relevance when looking at the issues of our own time.
Anthony Sattin is fascinated by the rich history of West Africa--the kind not taught in schools
Caption: From far left: View of Timbuktu, by the early 19th-century French explorer Auguste Rene Caillie. Map of West Africa, c.1547, depicting the trading fortress of Sao Jorge da Mina on the African Gold Coast. Mansa Musa of Mali (c.1280-c.1337) with crown, sceptre and orb
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sattin, Anthony. "In the realms of gold." Spectator, 26 Jan. 2019, p. 30+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A573558777/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=55b299ed. Accessed 5 Dec. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A573558777
QUOTE:
"dismantles the racist myth of west African 'backwardness'." Scanlan added: "He shows that the inequalities that made the European 'scramble for Africa' possible grew out of a catastrophe, the path to which began in the 15th century."
A Fistful of Shells by Toby Green review – the west African slave trade
History books
The kingdoms of west Africa had diplomatic links and equal trade with Europe. Then the age of empires began
Padraic Scanlan
Fri 8 Mar 2019 09.00 GMT
Last modified on Mon 18 Mar 2019 15.14 GMT
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The Sainsbury African galleries at the British Museum include 16th-century brass plaques from the royal palaces in Benin. Photograph: Frank Baron/The Guardian
I
n 1897, in what is now southern Nigeria, a British force sacked the ancient capital of the kingdom of Benin. In the rubble, the expedition leaders found a cache of intricate brass, ceramic and wood artworks that seemed too beautiful and subtle to have been produced by a culture that the British regarded as “uncivilised”. The officers helped themselves. Many of the works are now in the British Museum; others were auctioned off for cash. The men who looted them believed they had a right to “rescue” the artworks for posterity (and profit). From their perspective, the stark economic inequality that characterised the relationship between European and west African states was natural and timeless.
In A Fistful of Shells, the historian Toby Green dismantles the racist myth of west African “backwardness”. He shows that the inequalities that made the European “scramble for Africa” possible grew out of a catastrophe, the path to which began in the 15th century.
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The Benin bronzes are one of many examples he uses to illustrate the slow collapse of west Africa’s economic fortunes. Through trans-Saharan trade routes to north Africa and the Mediterranean, the kingdom of Benin, like many other west African states, was connected to global markets long before the arrival of Portuguese caravels. Manillas – open-ended copper rings – were used as a currency, and they also had spiritual and cultural value; artists and craftspeople in Benin melted them down to cast into sculptures and plaques, including the bronzes.
The expansion of the Iberian empires and the beginnings of both plantation slavery and gold and silver mining in Spanish and Portuguese America had a heavy impact in west Africa. In the 15th century, Portuguese traders began to sail further down the coast, looking for gold and for enslaved labourers to work on sugar plantations in São Tomé, Madeira and Brazil. The Portuguese, with ready access to markets in the Americas and Asia, were able to bring copper manillas by the tens of thousands to Benin. The increase in the money supply led to rapid inflation. Between 1506 and 1517, the number of manillas needed to buy an enslaved captive nearly tripled. Slavery existed in Benin long before the transatlantic slave trade, but European demand intensified and coarsened the institution. The kingdom began to go to war expressly to capture slaves, in order to import more currency and stave off economic collapse. Benin lost human capital to the slave trade and fell further and further into arrears, importing more and more money that bought less and less.
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The bronze head of a queen. Photograph: Alamy
A Fistful of Shells begins with six case studies of this phenomenon of unequal capital accumulation from across west Africa. Each shows the same process at work. European merchants imported large quantities of objects used as currencies, including manillas, cowrie shells and strips of cloth, and exchanged them for gold and slave labourers. At least 30bn cowrie shells, harvested from the small molluscs called “money cowries”, were brought to the Bight of Benin between 1500 and 1875. Every fistful of shells made west Africa a bit poorer.
Green tracks the consequences of this mounting inequality in the west African political economy of the 18th century. Authoritarian states capable of keeping up with European demand for gold and enslaved people took power in the region, but were unable to check increasing disparity. As demand for gold in Europe fell, the slave trade became the focus of European interests. Societies where slavery had existed became slave societies; in places where the children of enslaved people had once been born free, slavery became a heritable and permanent status.
Green doesn’t conjure a nostalgic vision of a “merrie Africa” before European contact. Rather, he shows that cultural and commercial ties connecting west Africa to the wider world existed and flourished long before the consolidation of a capitalist system dominated by Europe and its settler-colonies. What was lost in the acceleration of western capitalism was a more generous, expansive and flexible idea of equality. No one in particular “planned” the slave trade. What emerged from tens of thousands of transactions was a toxic industry that transformed world history, enriching Europe and impoverishing west Africa.
But Europeans interpreted west African poverty and enslavement on both sides of the Atlantic as evidence of European economic and cultural supremacy – eternal, inevitable and right. The 19th-century imperial vision of Africa as somehow outside of history continues to mark even “world” histories, which often privilege the global north. A Fistful of Shells is an antidote to these histories, and to the master narrative of Africa as historical object, rather than subject.
• A Fistful of Shells is published by Allen Lane (£30). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
QUOTE:
"stunning work of research and argumentation." Olusoga went on to comment: "It has the potential to become a landmark in our understanding of the most misunderstood of continents."
30 January 2019
Africa’s forgotten empires
Africa’s relationship with the wider world continues to be understood largely through colonialism. But before this came centuries of contact and interaction with outsiders, and not just Europeans.
By David Olusoga
ART MEDIA/PRINT COLLECTOR/GETTY IMAGES
The Kingdom of Dahomey (in present-day Benin), 1893
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The German philosopher Hegel claimed that Africa “is no historical part of the world”. The corollary of this was taken to be that African history only began when Europeans started to arrive. This idea, and variants of it, became one of the fallacies deployed to justify the Atlantic slave trade, colonisation and the high-handed paternalism that characterised European rule right up until decolonisation in the 1960s. Even before the flags of the European colonisers had been lowered, and the newly independent nations of modern Africa emerged, urgent calls had been made for new histories of the continent that explored the longer and deeper history of Africa’s great civilisations.
Sadly, that corrective is still necessary as, outside of the continent, Africa’s past continues to be understood largely through the colonial era of the 19th and 20th centuries. Yet at times discussions of African history can become ensnared by a false dichotomy, a choice between the familiar, Eurocentric narrative – dominated by explorers, missionaries, gun boats and the Maxim gun – and a more Afrocentric story, focusing on pre-colonial Africa. This line in the sand, drawn between two forms of history, can obscure a key point; that before formal colonisation in the 19th century were several centuries of contact and interaction with outsiders, and not just Europeans. It is those centuries of interaction and their long-term economic impact on Africa that are explored in unusual detail in Toby Green’s remarkable new book, A Fistful of Shells: West Africa From the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution.
Not an easy work to categorise, it is at its core an economic history in which the author poses a profoundly challenging question. Why, he asks, did economic exchanges between Africa and Europe become so unequal over time – favouring the latter and inhibiting African societies’ ability to accumulate capital – and what role did the Atlantic slave trade come to play in this process? The ambition of the central thesis explains the scale of the book – more than 600 pages – yet this seems almost restrained given how widely Green casts his net.
A Fistful of Shells is the fruit of research conducted in the archives of nine nations and required the author to undertake fieldwork across eight West African states. It shows. Passages from the author’s travels provide observations and anecdotes that usefully link the past to the present day and give voice to the lives and experiences of African themselves. Ranging far beyond economics, Green’s thesis becomes, ultimately, an almost philosophical meditation on the nature of value across differing cultures and societies during a long and under-examined era of early globalisation.
What marks the book out as unusual is not the volume of sources but their range. The use of oral histories from an impressive array of African societies is particularly refreshing. In his introduction Green also brilliantly deploys fine art – a series of portraits by a Dutch artist painted in mid 17th century Brazil, parts of which were then ruled from Amsterdam. One painting shows the face of Dom Miguel de Castro who, despite his Portuguese name and flamboyant European dress, was an ambassador from the court of Kongo, an African kingdom then allied to the Dutch. The same portrait astonished visitors to last year’s Histórias Afro-Atlânticas exhibition in São Paulo.
This breadth of material makes it interesting to wonder if Green might have been able to paint an even more vivid panorama of this earlier period had he been able to call upon the 15th and 16th century archives of Portugal, the European nation with the longest history of trade to Africa. Many of those records – concerning trade but also diplomacy, war and missionary work – along with an unknowable amount of material culture, were lost in 1755 when an earthquake and tsunami devastated Lisbon (the disaster at the centre of Voltaire’s Candide), obliterating the city and expunging the ledgers that recorded the preceding three centuries of the African trade. The frailty of documentary sources and material culture is poignantly highlighted again through Green’s use of a war standard sent to Lisbon by the infamous King Adandozan of Dahomey (a state located in present-day Benin). Although reproduced here, the standard itself was lost to the fire that destroyed the Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro in 2018.
By bringing together so many sources Green is able to refute Hegel’s negation of African history on two levels; not only does Africa have a long and complex history, but it shares much of that past with other players in a global trading economy that stretches back over a millennium. The Africa that emerges here is one dominated by numerous powerful kingdoms and empires, often governed by strong dynasties and leaders, each with their own obsessions and ambitions. It is a continent of intricately complicated cultural and religious beliefs and practices, in which militarised and sometimes relatively urbanised societies rise and fall. In other words, African societies were little different in structural terms from the kingdoms of Europe and North Africa with whom they traded. Where differences came to be acute was in the meanings and values attached to various goods and commodities, including the cowrie shells of the book’s title. Shipped to Africa from the Maldives in the Indian Ocean in vast quantities and over several centuries, cowries were used as a form of currency by many African peoples.
The trade in ideas, technologies, art and culture between Africa and her partners flowed both ways, a reality that was accentuated by the slavery trade – something that Green explores in great depth. Not only did African goods and commodities pulse through the arteries of the Atlantic world, cultural knowledge and intellectual capital was taken to the New World in the minds of the millions of human beings who were themselves commodified and exchanged. The Maroons, communities of escaped slaves that emerged in Jamaica, Panama and elsewhere, fought their wars using military theories they had learnt on the continent of their birth. Likewise, the rice plantations of South Carolina were cultivated using not just African labour but also African knowledge. This expertise was intentionally transplanted into American soil by British slave traders who had enslaved thousands of people from the rice-growing regions of Sierra Leone. These Africans were kidnapped to order, their minds as valuable a commodity as their bodies.
Throughout A Fistful of Shells Green points to the long historical shadow that lies behind the underdevelopment of modern Africa. He argues that the cash-crop monocultures imposed upon African nations by the colonial powers in the 20th century partially have roots in the plantation economies of the 19th century, when powerful African leaders, encouraged by Britain and other states, use enslaved and coerced labour to grow cotton, peanuts and palm oil for export. Likewise, the general distrust in national leaders in 21st century Africa, Green feels, has links to the 17th and 18th century ruptures in the relationship between elites and their people, caused by the slave trade and the wars and instability it propagated.
Although not always the easiest text to follow – the thematic approach at times obscuring the sense of a developing narrative – this is a stunning work of research and argumentation. It has the potential to become a landmark in our understanding of the most misunderstood of continents.
David Olusoga’s books include “Black and British: A Forgotten History”
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STEPHEN WILLIAMS12 APRIL 20190 COMMENTS
Toby Green draws on a rich variety of sources to reveal how West Africa’s present dilemmas are intimately linked to its precolonial past. Review by Stephen Williams.
The concept that is still prevalent in the West – that African history only really began when Europeans arrived – is a concept that still needs debunking. And author Toby Green, through dint of travel to West Africa and diligent research of archives in nine nations, has done just that, writing a remarkable book in the process.
Central to the book’s thesis is the idea that West Africa’s rich economic history and linkages with the modern world predate the arrival of slavery and European colonialism.
“Africa was not a colonial setting until the nineteenth century, and from the thirteenth century on its peoples and rulers were active participants in shaping the modern world,” he explains.
Africa had formed global economic and political connections long before the arrival of Europeans.
Africans traded salt, gold, textiles, and other commodities like cowrie shells before the trade in enslaved people became preeminent.
This distant history tells us much about the difficulties and complexities of West Africa’s economies today.
“The focus [in the overwhelming number of universities where African history is taught]… is almost always as this relates to slavery, repeating an old trope of primitivism and oppression,” Green writes.
“Yet African history is much more complex than this allows… and the root causes of many of the problems of the present lie precisely in this more distant past.”
For Green, the issue of capital accumulation is central for understanding how economic inequalities arose between Africa and the rest of the Western hemisphere.
“For several centuries,” he writes, “Western African societies exported what we might call ‘hard currencies’, especially gold: these were currencies that retained their value over time.
“For the first two centuries of Atlantic trade, these societies also imported large amounts of goods that were used as currencies: cowries, copper, cloth iron.
“However, these were what we might call ‘soft’ currencies’, which were losing their relative value over time, as opposed to gold and silver.”
The wealth and capital of the European empires brought about by such systems of economic control was invested in the technologies of the Industrial Revolution, further enforcing the unequal relationship between a once powerful West Africa and the dominant European states.
“West and West-Central Africa were by the early nineteenth century very much disadvantaged in their access to the capital needed to finance investment and economic growth,” writes Green.
Green makes some interesting observations regarding the similarities between Europe and Africa regarding the rise of aristocracies and revolutionary movements.
“In West Africa, as in Europe, the rise of the ‘fiscal-military state’ grew in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and with it powerful aristocracies.
“In West Africa, as in Europe, popular forces led by the trading class came to challenge these aristocracies; in both regions, the 1780s and 1790s witnessed decisive revolutionary movements.”
For example, there was an attempted revolt by the many slaves of Funta Jaala in 1785, only four years before the revolution in France.
Green argues that this was not merely “coincidence”. He writes that the transnational connections of West Africa with the Americas, Europe and the Middle East contributed to events in all these world regions, and transformed the world.
“Yet the unequal economic foundations of this relationship,” Green observes, “meant that the consequences of these revolutions would be very different; and that these processes would pave the way for formal colonialism in the nineteenth century.”
Regrettably, neither slavery nor injustice was eradicated as a result of revolution in West Africa. During the nineteenth century, Green tells us, the reality was that the practice of slavery actually increased.
“With the shutting down of the Atlantic trade [following the abolition of the slave trade] captives were no longer exportable from the ports of West Africa, but the processes that created them did not vanish overnight,” he writes.
“Instead, coerced labour was used to increase agricultural output and the supply of produce to the European traders in the era of what is called ‘legitimate trade’.”
According to recent estimates, he tells us, the size of the slave population in West Africa was comparable to that of the Americas by 1850.
Between a quarter and a half of the population of Sokoto in northern Nigeria was enslaved by that time.
A new view of West Africa
A Fistful of Shells is principally an attempt to show how West Africa’s precolonial histories are central to an understanding of the dilemmas of the present and to highlight the active role of its peoples in history, thereby transforming our view of the region.
In Green’s own words: “Africa has been so global for so long that its continued exclusion from world history speaks volumes about misconceptions that have arisen outside the continent over so many centuries.”
And yet, a nagging question remains. This is a hugely important book and offers much in terms of the continent’s rich history, but going forward, how can this knowledge be best utilised in formulating political and economic strategies to Africa’s benefit?
For while this book uncovers the roots of many of Africa’s problems, it provides little in the way of solutions.
QUOTE:
"remarkable book." Finnegan added: "For all its impressive scholarship A Fistful of Shells is notably readable, supported by great illustrations and a stunning cover – and, in the best sense, personal. ... [T]his really is a 'groundbreaking' work."
A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution, by Toby Green
Ruth Finnegan praises a book celebrating the agency of Africans across the centuries
April 4, 2019
By Ruth Finnegan
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Art installation on beach
Source: Getty
Toby Green opens his remarkable book with a quotation from the 19th-century Sultan of Sokoto: “I have not stolen my fire from anyone’s lamp.” He is justified. This original and thoughtful work is based on detailed first-hand knowledge of and collaboration with the cultures and peoples it depicts. Green uses a combination of documentary sources, both primary and secondary (many previously unexplored by European scholars), material culture and oral sources, including both extensive local collections and literature such as the Sunjata epic, skilfully woven into a persuasive and insightful narrative.
A long and unfortunate tradition in African studies, still only too pervasive, is to see Africa (generalised) as a continent of nothingness: of passive and unchanging “ahistoricity” until the advent of movers and shakers from Europe. No one reading the detail here – and spectacular it often is – could again fall into that trap.
Green depicts a rich, complex and sophisticated region. In his colourful and fully evidenced pages, we meet the special circumstances, the ups and downs, the choices and the miseries of West Africa. He presents all this, rightly, as part of world history, something that “defies generalisation yet has a universal importance”. There is the long history of reciprocity with Europe; the rise and fall of empires; internationally valued gold; art and music; and complex urban cultures such as Timbuktu, in many ways the harbingers of what we now term “modernity”. From the 13th century onwards, the peoples and rulers of West Africa were active participants in shaping the modern world.
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Far from seeing Africans and their history as passively shaped by external forces – although these are fully recognised – Green focuses on agency. He speaks not of “slaves” but of “enslaved persons”: individuals who happened to have been captured but who had not for that reason ceased to act as individuals. They brought their music and their ideas with them, and played multiple – active – roles. Indeed the agency of the enslaved in both Africa and North America eventually proved to be instrumental in overthrowing the Atlantic slave trade system.
I had expected a book of this weight and length to rely on theory and academic jargon to cement the contents or to be crammed with dry and boring detail. I was wrong. Each page, even when the horrors are there too (Green doesn’t shy away from them), is full of interest and humanity. The detail, too long and complicated to delineate here, is fascinating. I urge you to read it for yourself.
For all its impressive scholarship A Fistful of Shells is notably readable, supported by great illustrations and a stunning cover – and, in the best sense, personal. Given this, a shorter version for general readers and young people would be a grand contribution for the future, providing a much-needed new perspective on the world.
Normally suspicious of publishers’ blurbs, I have to say that this really is a “groundbreaking” work. Although Green is generous in acknowledging the contributions of others (an immense list), his lamp is most certainly his own, stolen from no others.
Ruth Finnegan is emeritus professor of social sciences at The Open University and a fellow of the British Academy. Her most recent book is Time for the World to Learn from Africa (2019).
A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution
By Toby Green
Allen Lane, 656pp, £30.00
ISBN 9780241003176