A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution by Toby Green (review)

Despite decades of effort by Africanist historians, Africa remains perennially misunderstood, falsely disconnected from the stream of history. Historians of the Atlantic world and early modern globalization have made some advances bringing Africa into their accounts, but a longstanding reductive approach remains in place. West Africa is commonly understood through the Atlantic Slave Trade and reduced to being a victim of external depredation, or set apart as a place waiting to be awoken from stasis. Toby Green's book not only pushes non-Africanists to think afresh about how they locate African in history, but does much to push Africanists and suggest paths they might take.

Two ambitions shape this wide-ranging and sweeping treatment of Atlantic Africa from the late 14th century to the mid 19th century. Part I asks how Africa's engagement in the Atlantic economy, initiated on largely favorable terms by sovereign states, eventually put Africa at an entrenched disadvantage which has persisted since. Green presents five case studies ranging geographically from Senegambia to the Kongo, and chronologically from the 15th to the 17th centuries, to illustrate variations on a common theme. Africans largely welcomed Atlantic trade. Indeed, Green shows how the early trade with Portugal was built on goods, business arrangements and state systems already connecting West Africa to global markets across the Sahara, contrary to common notions that European trade brought West Africa out of isolation. African rulers, merchants and workers not only managed these Atlantic connections well, they shaped how the early Atlantic world developed. They traded such goods as gold, peppers, and captives for cowrie shells, copper and cloth, with regional variations. As Europeans expanded the import of cowries directly from the Indian Ocean (instead of the established overland route), the more ample flow of money allowed African economies to expand and intensify. But this exchange also had negative effects. West Africans became dependent on this inflow of currency. They also established a pattern of trading away "hard" currencies (gold) for currencies which also had other uses (iron, copper, cloth). The metals also become tools and weapons; cloth was also worn and displayed; cowries also sustained rulers' prestige and ritual power. Meanwhile, the Europeans, who also never stopped having similar multiple uses for gold, gradually acquired the modern habit of treating it as capital to be accumulated. The enlarged flow of cowries, and Europeans' growing output of inexpensive cloth, created inflationary pressures which undermined Africans' buying power for European goods. Even strong states, dependent on revenues and currency circulation in their internal economies, found themselves obliged to produce more captives to obtain enough currency, driving the slave trade forward in all its destructive force. The long-term impact was not only the pressure to trade away captive labour, but also Africa's relative loss of currencies with durable value in global markets, creating an imbalance of capital which benefited the West.

In Part II Green foregrounds another important ambition of this large book in a series of six thematic essays focused on the period from about the late 17th century to the early 19th century. Green wants to render Atlantic Africa a fully historical part of the dynamic Atlantic world. African societies were not only deeply challenged by the rise of the Atlantic world, but also responded and contributed to it in patterns that reached across land as well as around the Atlantic. Many factors are put in play – one of the strengths (and points) of Green's approach – and this web of forces cannot be adequately conveyed here. The broad story is one of building revolutionary tensions which would break out in the 19th century. Captured by their dependence on foreign trade, West African states increasingly used captives as a currency which could resist inflationary pressure. This, of course, placed African productive labour in the service of Europe as it robbed Africa. The violence of...