West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution

A Fistful of Shells

Shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize, Cundill History Prize, Fage and Oliver Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Pius Adesanmi Memorial Award 
 
Winner of the Historical Writers' Association Non-Fiction Crown 2020 
Winner of the American Historical Association's Jerry Bentley Prize in World History 2020 
Winner of the Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding 2019 
 
An Observer and Wall Street Journal Book of the Year 2019 
 
A groundbreaking history that will transform our view of West Africa 
 
By the time of the 'Scramble for Africa' in the late nineteenth century, Africa had already been globally connected for many centuries. Its gold had fuelled the economies of Europe and Islamic world since around 1000, and its sophisticated kingdoms had traded with Europeans along the coasts from Senegal down to Angola since the fifteenth century. Until at least 1650, this was a trade of equals, using a variety of currencies - most importantly shells: the cowrie shells imported from the Maldives, and the nzimbu shells imported from Brazil. 
 
Toby Green's groundbreaking new book transforms our view of West and West-Central Africa. It reconstructs the world of kingdoms whose existence (like those of Europe) revolved around warfare, taxation, trade, diplomacy, complex religious beliefs, royal display and extravagance, and the production of art. 
 
Over time, the relationship between Africa and Europe revolved ever more around the trade in slaves, damaging Africa's relative political and economic power as the terms of monetary exchange shifted drastically in Europe's favour. In spite of these growing capital imbalances, longstanding contacts ensured remarkable connections between the Age of Revolution in Europe and America and the birth of a revolutionary nineteenth century in Africa. 
 
A Fistful of Shells draws not just on written histories, but on archival research in nine countries, on art, praise-singers, oral history, archaeology, letters, and the author's personal experience to create a new perspective on the history of one of the world's most important regions. 
 
'Astonishing, staggering' Ben Okri, Daily Telegraph

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.

Toby Green's A Fistful of Shells uses a global archive - in Africa, the Americas and Europe - to explore the complex, flourishing and connected economy of West Africa existing long before a European capitalist system established itself on the continent. Extraordinarily written and researched, the book paints a huge, complex canvas, filled with individual detail.

A Fistful of Shells is exemplary: scholarly, sensitive, enlightening and often vivid. The author does much more than make Africa seem normal. He proclaims a daunting ambition: to explore the local and global implications of West Africa's economies during the age of slavery. He succeeds.

A work of staggering scholarship, drawing on previously untapped sources locked away in European vaults and historical records which, taken as a whole, contradict the age-old perceptions foisted on Africa ... peppered with astonishing facts ... polyphonic, detailed and vast.

Dismantles the racist myth of west African "backwardness" ... 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 rich and insightful work ... What emerges is a radically different view of the region from the one that has been generally available. 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.

This original and thoughtful work is based on detailed first-hand knowledge of and collaboration with the cultures and peoples it depicts ... 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.

A sprawling and nuanced look at the steady depletion of a continent with a powerful lament about the lack of academic interest in Africa's precolonial eras.

A multifaceted history of West Africa which turns many old assumptions on their heads. Green utterly demolishes the tired Western view that Africa had no history before the arrival of the Europeans, and that they naively ceded power in the region to the newcomers by exchanging valuable goods for baubles. A magisterial, extensive and fresh account of the history of West Africa that rewrites the region and its peoples back into World History, where they belong.

Toby Green's book restores the rich African history which she had been denied for too long. Here the author reveals that Africa was never at the margins of global commerce but was in fact a decisive player with the prowess to negotiate and also the goods - ivory, gum, gold - to supply.

Hassoum Ceesay, National Museum, The Gambia

Toby Green's transformative book repositions West African history in an entirely new light. It brings into focus the region's fundamental place in shaping the modern world as well as the powerful and also difficult legacy of this today.

Paul Reid, Director, Black Cultural Archives

Very seldom do I pick up a history book and wish I had written it myself. Toby Green's A Fistful of Shells is one such book. Brilliantly conceptualized, beautifully written, it breaks with colonially configured regional boundaries - which work to re-create unintended silos of knowledge - to imagine a West and West Central African Atlantic history of money, power, religion, and inequality that is as rich as it is sound.

Professor Nwando Achebe, Michigan State University

This book represents an extraordinary and admirable archival and bibliographic undertaking.

By the time of the 'Scramble for Africa' in the late nineteenth century, Africa had already been globally connected for many centuries. Its gold had fuelled the economies of Europe and the Islamic world since around 1000 CE, and its sophisticated kingdoms had traded with Europeans along the coasts from Senegal down to Angola since the fifteenth century. Until at least 1650, this was a trade of equals, using a variety of currencies - most importantly shells: the cowrie shells imported from the Maldives, and the nzimbu shells imported from Brazil. 
 
Toby Green's groundbreaking new book transforms our view of West and West-Central Africa. A Fistful of Shells draws not just on written histories, but on archival research in nine countries, on art, praise-singers, oral history, archaeology, letters and the author's personal experience to create a new perspective on the history of one of the world's most important regions.

Toby Green

Staggering... He has performed an admirable work of historical reconstruction, despite the enduring difficulty of giving expression to African voices

A marvellously detailed account of life on the edge of what is now Guinea-Bissau... conjures up with wonderful vividness the sights and sounds of this distant world... Green knocks old myths on the head: that Africans typically had a “subsistence economy”, or lived static lives. He also highlights just how global the material world of these people already was

[This] painstakingly researched study recreates a world in which slavery was a significant but widely disavowed part of everyday life

A stunning global history of West Africa, The Heretic of Cacheu weaves together the tragic histories of the Inquisition and the Atlantic slave trade. Drawing on archival research in three continents and presenting transformative new arguments in a profoundly moving narrative, with this new tour de force, Green confirms himself as the most innovative historian, writer, and thinker of his generation

Ana Lucia Araujo, author of Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery

Toby Green has produced a book of rare distinction. Working across a range of inquisition sources, languages and spatial locations, he has shown the emotional effects of imperial slave trafficking on African inhabitants and colonial sojourners in Cacheu, modern-day Guinea-Bissau. To produce this remarkable book, he looks through the crystalline lens of the life story of the richest trader in the town, a woman called Crispina Peres. Green reveals human emotions by exhuming sources that catalogue daily lives governed by politics, fears, betrayal, treachery, promiscuity, affairs, revenge, cruelties, imprisonment and religious confessions. This is a substantial contribution to knowledge and our understanding of the social history of Africans and Europeans in seventeenth-century West Africa

Dr. José Lingna Nafafé, author of Lourenço da Silva Mendonça and the Black Atlantic Abolitionist Movement in the Seventeenth Century

This book is more than a biography of a great West African settlement. It is also about how Cacheu held the keys to prosperity and progress for generations of Atlantic traders. As in his previous works, Toby Green has, again, given agency to the people of the West African Coast, in this particular case especially to Crispina Peres

Director General, National Centre of Arts and Culture, The Gambia

A rich microhistory centring on the life story of a fascinating African woman

The Heretic of Cacheu makes significant contributions to human philosophy, religion, and liberty... Green's work hums with moral urgency... Green returns the African woman to world history, not as a footnote but as a moral compass – a testimony to the power and beauty of religion and the humanity of power. The Heretic of Cacheu is thus both historical reconstruction and ethical reflection, a reclamation of Africa’s agency in the construction of modernity and a reminder to the world of women like Crispina Peres. In this sense, then, the book is not just about Atlantic history; it is a sobering reminder that the conscience of history remains with those who would not be silenced

Struggles over Life in a Seventeenth-Century West African Port

In 1665 Crispina Peres, the most powerful trader in the West African slave trafficking port of Cacheu, was arrested by the Inquisition. Her enemies had conspired to denounce her for taking treatments prescribed by Senegambian healers: the djabakós. But who was Peres? And why was the Portuguese Inquisition so concerned with policing the faith of a West African woman in today’s Guinea-Bissau? 
 
In The Heretic of Cacheu Toby Green takes us to the heart of this conundrum, but also into the atmosphere of a very distant time and place. We learn how people in seventeenth-century Cacheu built their houses, what they wore, how they worshipped – and also the work they did, how they had fun, and how they healed themselves from illness. 
 
Through this story, the haunting realities of the growing slave trade and the rise of European empires emerge in shocking detail. By the 1650s, the relationship between Europe, West Africa, and the Americas was already an old one, with slaving entrepots, colonies, and military bases interweaving over many generations. But Cacheu also challenged the dynamic. It was globally connected to places ranging from China and India to Brazil and Colombia, and women like Crispina Peres ran the town and challenged the patriarchy of empire. 
 
For the first time, through the surviving documents recording Peres’s case, we can see what this world was really like. The Heretic of Cacheu is an extraordinary act of historical recovery. It is the story of a seventeenth-century West African woman, but also of the shifting, sophisticated world in which she lived – its beliefs, values and people.

The Heretic of Cacheu

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Praise for The Heretic of Cacheu

Staggering... He has performed an admirable work of historical reconstruction, despite the enduring difficulty of giving expression to African voices

A marvellously detailed account of life on the edge of what is now Guinea-Bissau... conjures up with wonderful vividness the sights and sounds of this distant world... Green knocks old myths on the hea ...

[This] painstakingly researched study recreates a world in which slavery was a significant but widely disavowed part of everyday life

Staggering... He has performed an admirable work of historical reconstruction, despite the enduring difficulty of giving expression to African voices

A marvellously detailed account of life on the edge of what is now Guinea-Bissau... conjures up with wonderful vividness the sights and sounds of this distant world... Green knocks old myths on the hea ...

[This] painstakingly researched study recreates a world in which slavery was a significant but widely disavowed part of everyday life

Staggering... He has performed an admirable work of historical reconstruction, despite the enduring difficulty of giving expression to African voices

A marvellously detailed account of life on the edge of what is now Guinea-Bissau... conjures up with wonderful vividness the sights and sounds of this distant world... Green knocks old myths on the hea ...

[This] painstakingly researched study recreates a world in which slavery was a significant but widely disavowed part of everyday life

Books by Toby Green

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