In 1897, in what is now southern Nigeria, a British force sacked the ancient capital of the kingdom of Benin. In the rubble, the expedition leaders found a cache of intricate brass, ceramic and wood artworks that seemed too beautiful and subtle to have been produced by a culture that the British regarded as “uncivilised”. The officers helped themselves. Many of the works are now in the British Museum; others were auctioned off for cash. The men who looted them believed they had a right to “rescue” the artworks for posterity (and profit). From their perspective, the stark economic inequality that characterised the relationship between European and west African states was natural and timeless.
In A Fistful of Shells, the historian Toby Green dismantles the racist myth of west African “backwardness”. He shows that the inequalities that made the European “scramble for Africa” possible grew out of a catastrophe, the path to which began in the 15th century.
The Benin bronzes are one of many examples he uses to illustrate the slow collapse of west Africa’s economic fortunes. Through trans-Saharan trade routes to north Africa and the Mediterranean, the kingdom of Benin, like many other west African states, was connected to global markets long before the arrival of Portuguese caravels. Manillas – open-ended copper rings – were used as a currency, and they also had spiritual and cultural value; artists and craftspeople in Benin melted them down to cast into sculptures and plaques, including the bronzes.
The expansion of the Iberian empires and the beginnings of both plantation slavery and gold and silver mining in Spanish and Portuguese America had a heavy impact in west Africa. In the 15th century, Portuguese traders began to sail further down the coast, looking for gold and for enslaved labourers to work on sugar plantations in São Tomé, Madeira and Brazil. The Portuguese, with ready access to markets in the Americas and Asia, were able to bring copper manillas by the tens of thousands to Benin. The increase in the money supply led to rapid inflation. Between 1506 and 1517, the number of manillas needed to buy an enslaved captive nearly tripled. Slavery existed in Benin long before the transatlantic slave trade, but European demand intensified and coarsened the institution. The kingdom began to go to war expressly to capture slaves, in order to import more currency and stave off economic collapse. Benin lost human capital to the slave trade and fell further and further into arrears, importing more and more money that bought less and less.
A Fistful of Shells begins with six case studies of this phenomenon of unequal capital accumulation from across west Africa. Each shows the same process at work. European merchants imported large quantities of objects used as currencies, including manillas, cowrie shells and strips of cloth, and exchanged them for gold and slave labourers. At least 30bn cowrie shells, harvested from the small molluscs called “money cowries”, were brought to the Bight of Benin between 1500 and 1875. Every fistful of shells made west Africa a bit poorer.
Green tracks the consequences of this mounting inequality in the west African political economy of the 18th century. Authoritarian states capable of keeping up with European demand for gold and enslaved people took power in the region, but were unable to check increasing disparity. As demand for gold in Europe fell, the slave trade became the focus of European interests. Societies where slavery had existed became slave societies; in places where the children of enslaved people had once been born free, slavery became a heritable and permanent status.
Green doesn’t conjure a nostalgic vision of a “merrie Africa” before European contact. Rather, he shows that cultural and commercial ties connecting west Africa to the wider world existed and flourished long before the consolidation of a capitalist system dominated by Europe and its settler-colonies. What was lost in the acceleration of western capitalism was a more generous, expansive and flexible idea of equality. No one in particular “planned” the slave trade. What emerged from tens of thousands of transactions was a toxic industry that transformed world history, enriching Europe and impoverishing west Africa.
But Europeans interpreted west African poverty and enslavement on both sides of the Atlantic as evidence of European economic and cultural supremacy – eternal, inevitable and right. The 19th-century imperial vision of Africa as somehow outside of history continues to mark even “world” histories, which often privilege the global north. A Fistful of Shells is an antidote to these histories, and to the master narrative of Africa as historical object, rather than subject.
• A Fistful of Shells is published by Allen Lane (£30). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
