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

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.

• The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages
• African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic (The Early Modern Americas)
• African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa
• African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa
• Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa
• The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution
• Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order
• Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires
• They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South
• The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300-1589 (African Studies)