Toby Green’s research on European and African interactions in pre-colonial Western Africa (Cabo Verde and Upper Guinea, in particular) is among the first investigations of the African origins of the trans-Atlantic system, providing a clear example of how culture and enterprise inform and shape each other over time. Green shows how the Atlantic network of trade was facilitated and shaped by preexisting frameworks of cultural and economic exchange, in this case between the Diaspora populations of Iberian Jewish converts to Catholicism (conversos) and Western Africans living in the midst of the Mandinka expansion. The similarities between these two groups of peoples provided them with many of the same frames of reference and allowed merchants of both groups to find sufficient common ground to develop lasting trust-based commercial relationships. These relationships had enduring economic, social, cultural, environmental, and religious effects, which lend themselves to myriad areas of inquiry.

Green uses a variety of sources from Europe, Africa, and Latin America, the vast majority of them in the original Portuguese and Spanish. He consistently interrogates their reliability through comparison with translated early Arabic sources and oral history of Western Africa for the widest possible mix of perspectives, even when this does not bolster his thesis. This renders his methodology transparent, as readers are provided with explanations for interpretive choices and alerted to silences in the documents and the limits of these texts. When possible, Green places Africans and their words at the center of the research. For example, when comparing the slaving past of the cosmopolitan and outward-looking kingdom of Mali, he analyzes contemporary Islamic chroniclers like Ibn Taghrī Birdī and Al-Maqrīzī from the Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History (J.F.P. Hopkins and Nehemia Levtzion, 1981) instead of the European records that confirm this information (p. 74).

This monograph is divided into two parts: one with a local focus, and the other more global. Part 1 serves as a regional history of diaspora and creolization within Western Africa (1300–1550), whereas Part 2 begins with the opening of the Atlantic world in 1492 and takes on a global perspective to show the cultural, political, and social ramifications of the slave trade around the world. Green draws liberal attention to the sixty years’ overlap (1490–1550) that saw the greatest amount of transition, as European and African merchants together created one of the first trans-Atlantic systems. This approach allows Green to show how creolization and diaspora within Western Africa shaped the trade that influenced the Atlantic world, and how the Atlantic world, in turn, affected Western Africa.

Green’s claims originate with a small sample size: The slave trade from Upper Guinea at this time accounts for a mere 1 to 2 percent of the total slave trade. However, Green demonstrates how, despite this relatively small percentage, the people present in this particular locale were the original creators of precedents in the Atlantic slave trade, which would be followed (with some modifications) by other sets of European and African trade relationships for centuries to come. This research builds on the body of work created by Walter Hawthorne, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Linda Heywood, and John Thornton. Their culturally centered approaches answer the questions raised in the quantitative studies of David Eltis and David Richardson, Philip Curtin, and Joseph Inikori. A quantitative approach to such a small sample size would have overlooked the wealth of long-term cultural and social contributions that governed some of the first business interactions between Europeans and Africans in fifteenth-century Western Africa.

Much of this book’s greater historical relevance lies in analysis of West Africa’s contribution to the birth of economic and ideological currents associated with modernity. The plural identities both conversos and Western Africans had taken on as by-products of their respective diasporas facilitated the interconnectivity between the two. Green argues that the experiences of Atlantic discovery, trade, and enslavement required new worldviews, which helped create the proto-modern features of adaptability and flexibility of identity, as well as the scientific changes seen in the early modern period.

This type of research, then, has many implications for scholars of the modern era. For example, Green’s theories lend themselves to the study of the gulf between African and European economic development by offering alternatives to geographic determinism, and shedding more light on dependency theory and the origins of what Walter Rodney termed the “gun-slave cycle” in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972). The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Africa addresses how the trans-Atlantic slave trade altered African lineage patterns, political structures, labor organization, gender relationships, human interaction with the environment, and the manifestation of ritual power. These modifications created a pattern of political instability in which wars between states and conflicts between villages became increasingly the norm. This, in turn, changed the way African communities defended themselves and built alliances, essentially structuring their societies around cycles of violent disorder and practices of enslavement. The ideology of racism emerged to justify the ways in which profits were derived from this violence. This same ideology would later feature prominently in European justifications for colonial expansion in Africa.

Green shows how the persisting and devastating legacies of the early Atlantic slave trade—the violence, inhumanity, racism, exploitation, and so on—gave birth to very proto-modern concepts of identity that shaped global understandings of modernity. This work has relevance to historians of pre-colonial West Africa and the Atlantic slave trade, but also to scholars in other fields who investigate the ways in which business and society are intimately connected, and the persisting cultural ramifications of these connections.