A Fistful Of Shells: West Africa From The Rise Of The Slave Trade To The Age Of Revolution, by Toby Green

Writing about West Africa during the period of the slave trade, especially when one wishes, as the author does, to integrate the history of West Africa within its larger history as well as the history of the Atlantic world, is a minefield that most people would likely wish to avoid. If this author is somewhat too interested in writing about problems of intersectionality and clearly has some negative thoughts about Europeans and settler colonists–we get the familiar canards about slaves being mere commodities to Europeans and European-Americans while slaves were supposedly embedded in family and social contexts in the African and generally indigenous world here, which is completely bogus–the author is at least an honest enough historian to wrestle with the complexities of social change over time, noting that those who are against one form of oppression are not consistent in their opposition nor are they immune from being in favor of other forms of injustice. Justice is hard to manage, and the author’s honest wrestling with this question over centuries of the history of West Africa demonstrates an honest man facing a challenging historical record with considerable honesty, if not perfectly.

This book is an ambitious single-volume work of a bit less than 500 pages of core material. The book begins with a list of maps, foreword, note on spellings/names, glossary, and an introduction. After this, the book is divided into two parts. The first part of the book contains five chapters that deal with the causes of economic divergence in West and West-Central Africa from Senegambia to northern Angola. Included in this part of the book is a timeline for the fifteenth, sixteenth, and some of the seventeenth centuries, the rise and fall of the great empires of the Sahel like Mali and Songhai (1), the trade routes from Senegambia to Sierra Leone (2), the gold trade of the gold coast (3), the rivers of cloth and masks of bronze of the bights of Benin and Biafra (4), and the kingdom of Kongo from majesty to revolt (5), closed with a coda. The second part of the book looks at the consequences of politics, belief systems, and revolutions from below, starting with a timeline for West African political history from 1680 to 1850 or so. This part of the book contains chapters about slavery and value in the eighteenth century (6), the fiscal-military state in West African politics (7), new societies and worldviews relating to the Atlantic and West African worlds (8), the transnational Africa and the struggle and rise of modernity (9), warrior aristocracies and pushback from below (10), and the complicated history of Islam, revolution, and aristocracy in the region (11). The book then ends with a conclusion, bibliography, notes, list of illustrations, and an index.

Ultimately, if the history of West Africa during this period looks pretty bleak, it looks bleak for pretty obvious reasons. West Africa did have a history, and the author demonstrates the relationship of historians like himself to the biased griots who served as the official historians of West African states who had the power to shape how rulers were viewed and how they attained legitimacy, while being despised for their lack of integrity as many contemporary historians are. Similarly, the author notes the problems that West African states had in managing the tensions of their position, seeking to profit off of the power of statehood, gaining luxury goods for themselves and other members of the elite, managing the demands of European trading partners and foreign and domestic markets, handling the cultural influence of Christianity and Islam from outside, and dealing with social pressures from within their nations. If many of the nations discussed here ranging from the Mali and Songhai and Kongo empires at the start of the period explored to the Hausa kingdoms, Oyo, Borno, and Fulu states towards the end of the time period this book explores, did not do a great job in handling these challenges, the author demonstrates that West African nations had their own distinct cultures as well as integration with the Atlantic and Middle Eastern worlds, not only through religion and trade (including the trade of slaves, palm oil, gold, cloth, and other materials like cowrie shells and iron bars), but also in views of authority and power. People, trade goods, and ideas managed to travel by land and by sea, in ways that continue to shape life in the Atlantic world to this day.