Green also makes the decision to not go into great detail about the horrors of the slave trade or what happened to African slaves once they reached America - he is content that we understand the horrors of this practice and chooses to focus on Africa and the people who remained on the continent for the most part. He also discusses the differences between African states that participated in the slave trade and those that, even if only for a time, refused to sell slaves to outsiders.

A more class based perspective allows Green to show how African rulers in particular participated in exploitation along with the Europeans while many other people suffered. I think a key part of this is the level of detail Green engages with, showing that West Africa was a complex place with many individual actors some of whom benefited from trade with Europeans, including most notoriously the trade in humans, while others were victims. Thankfully, I think Green does an excellent job at showing how Africans were actors in their own history, not strictly victims, but not freeing the Europeans for their exploitation of the continent. Pushing it too far would risk arguing that African’s were primarily responsible for the slave trade and later colonial exploitation, absolving the Europeans of responsibility for their actions. Green’s primary argument is that far from being passive victims of European exploitation, Africans were instrumental in shaping their own environment.Įffectively making this argument requires Green to thread a delicate needle. Instead the book takes an African-centric perspective, examining how African powers and individuals were instrumental in shaping the political and economic changes that West Africa experienced during this period. It covers a period dominated by the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade but does not limit itself just to discussions of that topic. I found Toby Green’s book an engaging antidote to old fashioned views of African history that still persist in popular understanding of the continent.Ī Fistful of Shells is primarily an economic history of West Africa from c.1450 until c.1800. Obviously this is a very limited way of viewing an entire continent’s history - lots happened in Africa before the arrival of Europeans and plenty happened there besides exploitative actions taken by those Europeans once they arrived. Older scholarship notoriously labeled Africa a continent “without history” and even more recent studies have at times viewed it entirely through the lens of colonialism and the slave trade - not allowing for any agency on the part of Africans themselves. All too often African history is treated as a topic either entirely divorced from the rest of global history or one that is entirely determined by forces beyond the continent.

A fistful of shells