Part of review forum on “The Heretic of Cacheu: Crispina Peres and the Struggle over Life in Seventeenth-Century West Africa”
Toby Green’s latest book arrives at an important moment when scholars of Atlantic history are increasingly attentive to the African side of the early modern world. It is also a moment when history, as a discipline, is under attack. By turning the spotlight on an individual case, Green demonstrates how microhistory can illuminate broader patterns of globalization, power, and cultural exchange. He also shows that history can also help us to understand contemporary problems. The central character in this study is a seventeenth-century African woman, Crispina Peres, who was accused and tried by the Portuguese Inquisition for witchcraft. Peres’s case serves as a way through which Green reconstructs the economic, religious, and social lives that shaped Cacheu’s world. In doing so, Green challenges prevalent and widespread ideas that misrepresent historical documents as silent on women’s agency. In fact, he shows the active role African actors, including women, played in the formation of the Atlantic economy in the seventeenth century. This is a major contribution to African and Atlantic history.
Green’s methodology follows a microhistorical approach at its finest. The result is a rich reconstruction of daily life in an African port town, Cacheu, including its markets, religious rituals, entertainment, and therapeutic practices, while stressing its population’s connections to the global market. Cacheu was the landscape, the location where Asian textiles and European manufactured goods arrived and were exchanged for enslaved individuals destined for the slave societies in the Americas. By tracing the flow of commodities, such as textiles, but also gold and ivory from the interior of the African continent, Green pushes globalization back into the seventeenth century. This is not new in his career and is very much in line with his previous influential studies, including The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589 (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (Chicago University Press, 2019).
The Heretic of Cacheu’s greatest strength is its ability to make the “noises” of the archive audible and the seventeenth-century Cacheu and its population relevant for nonspecialists. Rather than allowing the fragmentary nature of the sources to obscure the past, Green skillfully assembles them into a compelling narrative that places African men and women at the center of historical action. This approach resonates with earlier studies of West African ports, including Robin Law’s Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving “Port,” 1727–1892 (Ohio University Press, 2004), Kristin Mann’s Slavery and the Birth of an African City: Lagos, 1760–1900 (Indiana University Press, 2010), and Imagine Lagos: Mapping History, Place, and Politics in a Nineteenth-Century African City (Ohio University Press, 2024) by Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi. The difference is that Green focuses on an earlier period.
The book is organized into ten chapters, plus an introduction and a conclusion. At the heart of The Heretic of Cacheu is Peres’s trial before the Portuguese Inquisition. Accused of witchcraft, she faced charges that, on their surface, appear rooted in invoking superpowers. Green, however, convincingly argues that the real motive behind the prosecution was Peres’s economic power. He shows how she controlled a substantial portion of Cacheu’s economic activities and threatened the interests of other merchants, prompting them to weaponize the Inquisition, a Portuguese institution, as a way of protecting their interests. In many ways, Green expands the literature on powerful merchant women along the African coast. While most of the available scholarship concentrates on the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, The Heretic of Cacheu focuses on an earlier period. His analysis expands Pernille Ipsen’s Daughters of the Trade (2015) and Vanessa S. Oliveira’s Slave Trade and Abolition (2021), books that reveal the centrality of African women traders. By pushing the chronology of African women’s commercial agency into the seventeenth century, Green opens new avenues for research on early modern gender relations in West Africa.
The Heretic of Cacheu is engaging, accessible to nonspecialists, and presents new information for historians of African societies. This makes it an ideal textbook for undergraduate courses on African or Atlantic history, as well as an important reference for graduate seminars focusing on themes around gender, economic history, or the early modern world. Green’s ethical stance permeates his narrative. He centers African voices and highlights the devastating impact of the slave trade on African societies. In doing so, he situates the slave trade as a catalyst for European industrial growth while simultaneously eroding African social and economic structures. Throughout the volume, Green invites his readers to reflect on reparations, historical memory, and the legacies of colonial exploitation. It deserves wide readership and scholarly attention.
