Based on substantial new research from primary sources and archives, this accessible interpretative history of West Central Africa from earliest times to 1852 gives comprehensive and in-depth coverage of the region. With equal focus given to both internal histories or inter-state interactions and external dynamics and relationships, this study represents an original approach to regional histories which goes beyond the existing scholarship on the area. By contextualising and expanding its range, to include treatment of the Portuguese colony of Angola, John K. Thornton provides new understandings of significant events, people, and inter-regional interactions which aid the grounding of the history of West Central Africa within a broader context. A valuable resource to students and scholars of African history.

An accessible interpretative history of West Central Africa from earliest times to 1852 with comprehensive and in-depth coverage of the region.

This book traces the inland origins of slaves leaving West Central Africa at the peak period of the transatlantic slave trade.

This is a survey of pre-colonial West Africa, written by the internationally respected author and journalist, Basil Davidson. He takes as his starting point his successful textA History of West Africa 1000-1800, but he has reworked his new text specially for a wider international readership. In the process he offers a fascinating introduction to the rich societies and cultures of Africa before the coming of the Europeans.

Publisher Description

By the time the “Scramble for Africa” among European colonial powers began in the late nineteenth century, Africa had already been globally connected for centuries. Its gold had fueled the economies of Europe and the Islamic world for nearly a millennium, and the sophisticated kingdoms spanning its west coast had traded with Europeans since the fifteenth century. Until at least 1650, this was a trade of equals, using a variety of currencies—most importantly, cowrie shells imported from the Maldives and nzimbu shells imported from Brazil. But, as the slave trade grew, African kingdoms began to lose prominence in the growing global economy. We have been living with the effects of this shift ever since. 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.