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

“It’s by Toby Green, who is at King’s College London, and it’s a history of West Africa before its colonisation by Europe—beginning with the Portuguese and going on to the French and the British and the Germans. The author looks at these very advanced, powerful, prosperous kingdoms in West Africa—like Oyo or Benin or Dahomey—and argues that until the rise of the slave trade disturbed the economic equilibrium, they traded on equal terms with the Islamic world to the north.” Read more...

The Best History Books: the 2020 Wolfson Prize shortlist

Richard Evans, Historian

“A Fistful of Shells is groundbreaking. The author, Toby Green, draws on years of work in the archives—consulting written and oral histories, art, maps, and artefacts—to tell a completely different story of pre-slave and pre-colonial western Africa. It is an eye-opener for anyone who thinks that the coastal regions of North and West Africa were closed, sedentary or “backward” prior to the 18th and the 19th centuries.Green shows, through the extraordinary research he has done, that these West African kingdoms were confident, cosmopolitan, economically advanced, trading far and wide—with the West and beyond—and culturally sophisticated (hence his interest in looking at artworks and the archaeological archive as well).” Read more...

Best Books of 2019 on Global Cultural Understanding

Ash Amin