By Toby Green
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.
