How did the opening of the Atlantic trade affect Africa? This has been a longstanding question in African historiography, certainly going back to the birth of today's scholarship on African history in the 1960s. And within the larger question, how specifically did the trade in slaves shape Africa? Toby Green enters into the long discussion with this extraordinary volume, the product of substantial research in both primary sources and the extensive secondary literature, highlighted with the deploying of some never before used texts from archives. At the same time, he draws on African oral traditions, some of which were published, others gleaned from archives of tradition and some collected directly by him in the field.
Green falls firmly in the camp, following Walter Rodney, Paul Lovejoy and Boubacar Barry, among many others, who maintain that the Atlantic trade was a disaster for Africa. While most scholars have highlighted the slave trade's deleterious effect on population, population quality, and high levels of violence, Green adds some interesting insights from a more purely economic point of view.
He begins his work focusing on the terms of trade and particularly the role of money in Atlantic exchanges. African trade was conducted in multiple currencies, among them only gold and copper counted as money in Europe, and so trade required making complex equivalencies between Africa's many currencies and European currency. Green equates this European currency with what would be called ‘hard currency’ today, that is money that can be exchanged to purchase imports, and by extension of the same logic, African currencies would be the equivalent of ‘soft’ currencies, only valuable in one regional market.
He proposes that the monetary disequilibrium produced by the flow of supply and demand for African products, particularly gold, led to inflation, and in turn to political instability. The instability often favoured the growth of strong, militarised states which became dependent on imports to maintain their power, and often paid for the wherewithal of power in slaves. Thus the slave trade, rather than simply being a European imposition on Africa, was a product of a much more complex set of trade imbalances than the more usual ‘guns for slaves’ analysis of the trade supposes.
Green proposes that the concept of ‘fiscal military state’ originally advanced to analyse early modern European states could be applied to African states. This idea promises to be a fruitful prospect, and Green's efforts, preliminary in this telling, can easily lead to a development of the concept in Africa. It is one of the strongest of several approaches Green presents in this book.
In later sections, he sees commodity trade, particularly in European manufactured goods, creating a situation in which European and Asian products were dumped on African (elite) consumers, pushing the pernicious trade in slaves with its impacts on social tranquillity and security.
Green concludes the book with an argument that the growth of military fiscal states, with their exploitative structures led to emerging revolutionary pressure from below. He illustrates this with the Islamic revolutionary movement of the 18th and early 19th century, which has recently been elaborated by Rudolph Ware and Paul Lovejoy. Connecting these movements, particularly the Islamic ones, is one of the most exciting developments in recent African historiography.
Green's ideas are complex and provocative, and he advances enough supporting material to make them plausible. But many of the economic ideas are difficult to document from a situation in which statistical information is all but unavailable. Determining growth of money supply and inflation clearly needs accurate or at least plausibly accurate data on price levels and monetary production. Green makes a good start at this, primarily by using exchange rates (a better measure of terms of trade than daily prices) to get at the underlying economic data.
A Fistful of Shells is an invitation to try some new ideas, search out solutions for data problems and debate possible outcomes. Well written, clear and documented with a fine sample of available material, this book will be welcome for years to come.
