A Fistful of Shells by Toby Green

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. 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. 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. 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.

A Fistful of Shells is primarily an economic history of West Africa from c.1450 until c.1800. It covers a period dominated by the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade but does not limit itself just to discussions of that topic. 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. Green’s primary argument is that far from being passive victims of European exploitation, Africans were instrumental in shaping their own environment.

Effectively making this argument requires Green to thread a delicate needle. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. That is not to say that the enslaved experience is absent, just that if you are looking for a detailed study of Trans-Atlantic Slavery this is not that book.

Green’s interest range much further and in many ways it was his handling of other trades, such as in gold or cloth, that I found even more interesting. This is because while I was obviously aware of the slave trade and the greater nuance that Green provided was interesting, I was almost entirely ignorant of these other trades. A key theme of Green’s book is how the trade with West Africa was primarily extractive - it removed resources of long term value such as gold or humans from the continent in exchange for resources that had shorter value, such as cloth or other materials that would decay. This line of argument while interesting is harder to follow I think and is one of Green’s weaker points. I’m far from a specialist and wouldn’t be comfortable critiquing the overall argument, but I just found it hard to fully understand the details.

This argument is interconnected with broader points about how in West Africa multiple types of currency were often in use simultaneously. Green uses this argument to show the economic complexity of the region and to push back against older histories that saw Africa as a “barter economy” without real understanding of money. Green provides very valuable nuance to our understanding of the complex economics of West African trade, but I think it also complicates his other argument about the role of extractive trade imbalance between Africa and the rest of the world. It doesn’t undermine it so much as make it harder to follow and after finishing I felt that there was much greater depth to this line of thinking that I just didn’t fully grasp.

Instead, what I found most revelatory about A Fistful of Shells was how it showed the interconnectedness of West Africa, Europe, and North America in this period. Green shows how material trade was an important linking factor, but he doesn’t limit himself to just that. Instead he covers the transmission of ideas, perhaps most intriguingly in how the Haitian Revolution potentially inspired popular revolts in West Africa against an increasingly unpopular aristocracy made wealthy off the slave trade, and the sustained diplomatic connections between West African political entities and European powers. The role of African embassies to Europe and Brazil are particularly interesting and show a very different perspective on African-European relations than we usually see in popular discussions of this period.

Far from being isolated from the rest of the world, Green shows that Africa was deeply connected to European and North American trends - and not just as a receiver but also as an influencer. As a result I think A Fistful of Shells shows the flaws in approaching a history of Europe during this period without considering the role Africa and African powers played in culture and trade. It was African gold that sustained many European monarchies and wars, for example. History books often emphasise the establishing of trade links to India by the Portuguese and the American colonies of the Spanish, but the African trade which was significantly enhanced during this period feels equally important and was integrated with the two, for example Indian cotton was a common trade good in West Africa.

While I found Green’s book to be a little long and in places a bit slow, the content within was absolutely fascinating and did a lot to change my perspective on African history and my broader understanding of global history. I think even just reading part of it could do a lot to expand anyone’s understanding of the development of global trade in the early modern period and I would definitely recommend it as an introduction to the subject.