A Fistful of Shells : : West Africa From the Rise of the Slave Trade to the age of Revolution

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Call Number: 966 Gr, Adult Book / Nonfiction / History / Africa / Miscellaneous
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	966 Gr	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / History / Africa / Miscellaneous	4-week checkout	Due 05-18-2024

Part one: Causes : economic divergence in West and West-Central Africa. "Three measures of gold" : the rise and fall of the great empires of the Sahel -- Causeways across the savannah : from Senegambia to Sierra Leone -- Ready money : The Gold Coast and the gold trade -- Rivers of cloth, masks of bronze : the bights of Benin and Biafra -- The kingdom of Kongo : from majesty to revolt -- Part two: Consequences : politics, belief and revolutions from below. "With boots worth 3 slaves" : slavery and value in the eighteenth century -- On a war footing : the "fiscal-military state" in West African politics -- Feeding power : new societies, new worldviews -- Transnational Africas, struggle and the rising of modernity -- Warrior aristocracies and pushback from below -- Let them drink rum! : Islam, revolution and the aristocracy.
"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."--Publisher's website.

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