Part of review forum on “The Heretic of Cacheu: Crispina Peres and the Struggle over Life in Seventeenth-Century West Africa”
Toby Green’s The Heretic of Cacheu offers a vivid and ambitious microhistory centered on Crispina Peres—an Afro-Portuguese merchant, healer, and household head in the seventeenth-century port of Cacheu on Senegambia’s coast. Crispina’s 1665 arrest and trial before the Portuguese Inquisition provide the narrative core through which Green reconstructs a complex social world shaped by hybrid spiritual practice, gendered authority, and the moral and commercial obligations of daily life. Drawing on Inquisition testimony, merchant records, missionary writings, and fragmentary administrative sources—alongside decades of ethnographic engagement in West Africa—Green weaves archival detail with interpretive nuance. The result is a deeply researched and beautifully written contribution to Atlantic and African history.
The book’s most compelling achievement lies in demonstrating how Crispina and Cacheu challenged European epistemological assumptions. In Cacheu, women acted as merchants, negotiators, and healers; Catholicism overlapped with African spiritual knowledge; and illness reflected moral and social ruptures rather than simply bodily ailment. Green shows that the Inquisition’s prosecution of Crispina was fundamentally an effort to impose Iberian orthodoxy and gender hierarchy on a frontier society where these frameworks did not fully apply. The Heretic of Cacheu thus becomes a story of competing systems of knowledge and authority in the seventeenth-century Atlantic, with Crispina’s expertise and social power at its center.
Green situates his account within several central debates in African and Atlantic history. He challenges the notion that early modern European capitalism alone shaped global trade—commercial relationships in Cacheu depended on kinship, ritual legitimacy, and household authority rather than impersonal market rationality. He questions assumptions that African societies were static or “traditional,” portraying instead a world of fluid identities and negotiated authority. And he argues that Africa was not marginal to early globalization—even small coastal towns were enmeshed in transregional networks linking Senegambia, Lisbon, and Bahia.
The work also invites comparison with Walter Rodney’s classic 1966 intervention on the Upper Guinea coast. Like Rodney, Green finds little evidence for indigenous forms of slavery outside Islamic polities prior to European involvement. He does not, however, pursue Rodney’s further argument that internal class tensions within West African societies facilitated collaboration with European traders. Green’s reconstruction of female authority nonetheless opens space for revisiting this question. Where women possessed economic, ritual, and household power, they too occupied positions within emerging Atlantic hierarchies. Crispina herself, Green notes, acknowledged the cruelty with which she treated enslaved people, and some of those individuals testified against her at trial. The book thus encourages reflection on how gendered authority intersected with coercive structures of Atlantic commerce—highlighting agency not only as transformative but also as implicated in systems of violence.
At the same time, the book’s methodological positioning raises productive tensions. Green casts this project partly as a response to what he has elsewhere called the “datafication” of history—the increasing reliance on machine-readable datasets and quantitative analysis. In a 2025 essay in Politics and Rights Review, he cautions that digital methods risk flattening lived complexity. His concern is understandable, and The Heretic of Cacheu demonstrates the irreplaceable value of close, empathetic archival reading.
Yet the book’s eschewal of digital resources also reveals certain limits. All historians work with “data” in the broad sense of traces extracted from sources; structuring those traces—whether on note cards or in databases—is integral to historical method. Projects such as Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s Louisiana Slave Database and Enslaved.org demonstrate that careful aggregation can enable microhistorical insight. Rather than flattening lives, such projects often make them newly visible. Moreover, Green’s narrow focus on Crispina’s household, while rich in texture, means that the wider world of “trade slaves”—those sold through Cacheu and shipped to the Americas—receives little attention.
Green’s lack of engagement with SlaveVoyages is particularly telling in this regard. Data in SlaveVoyages suggest that Cacheu was not, relative to other ports, a major slave-exporting center in the mid-seventeenth century and that departures during Crispina’s life declined over time. Engaging this evidence would not undermine Green’s analysis but might refine claims about Cacheu’s place in the Atlantic system and about Crispina’s authority in a port of diminishing international significance. This is not a question of “positivism,” but of scale: microhistory reveals textures of meaning, while digital evidence helps situate those textures within broader structures.
The Heretic of Cacheu is a significant, elegant, and intellectually ambitious work. Green’s reconstruction of Crispina’s world challenges long-standing assumptions about gender, spirituality, and authority in early modern Africa and the Atlantic. At the same time, the book invites further methodological conversation about how microhistorical interpretation and digital evidence might productively inform one another. As such, The Heretic of Cacheu is not only vital for understanding seventeenth-century Cacheu but also a prompt for renewed debate about historical method in a digital age.
