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    Unavailable
    A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution
    Unavailable
    A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution
    Unavailable
    A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution
    Ebook900 pages12 hours

    A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution

    By Toby Green

    3/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    By 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 1650, this was a trade of equals, using a variety of currencies—most 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 West-Central 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateMar 21, 2019
    ISBN9780226644745
    Unavailable
    A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution
    Author

    Toby Green

    Toby Green, formerly a journalist and travel writer, is Professor of Precolonial and Lusophone African History and Culture at King’s College London. His 2019 book A Fistful of Shells won the British Academy’s Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding, the American Historical Association’s Jerry Bentley Prize in World History and the Historical Writers’ Association Non-Fiction Crown.

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    Reviews for A Fistful of Shells

    3/5

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    • 2/5
      This aims to be a history of West Africa with very much an economics view of interactions and trade. And most of it went well over my head. Some chapters made sense, but to someone who can barely balance their current account, it just passed me by. I also found it very confusing as to who was where and when. The end papers were a modern map of Africa, and there were a few maps of regions within the book but, on the whole, ot was assuming a far greater familiarity with the geography than I possess. He uses landmarks but they weren't on the map, so I don;t know where he means. A few more maps of terretories and groups of people over time would have helped enormously. Overall I found it a bit muddled, but I think that is as it was assuming knowledge I don't have. This is the first of the 2019 Al Rhodan shortlist that I can't say I enjoyed reading.