... remarkable ... Not an easy work to categorise, it is at its core an economic history in which the author poses a profoundly challenging question ... Passages from the author’s travels provide observations and anecdotes that usefully link the past to the present day and give voice to the lives and experiences of African themselves. Ranging far beyond economics, Green’s thesis becomes, ultimately, an almost philosophical meditation on the nature of value across differing cultures and societies during a long and under-examined era of early globalisation. What marks the book out as unusual is not the volume of sources but their range. The use of oral histories from an impressive array of African societies is particularly refreshing. In his introduction Green also brilliantly deploys fine art ... Although not always the easiest text to follow—the thematic approach at times obscuring the sense of a developing narrative—this is a stunning work of research and argumentation. It has the potential to become a landmark in our understanding of the most misunderstood of continents.
Mr. Green’s book abounds in arresting vignettes ... There is no education without entertainment, and Mr. Green uses colorful episodes to exemplify serious points ... The sources do impose limitations, and Mr. Green has to leave stretches of West Africa in the history-less state for which Trevor-Roper condemned it. He is also less than assured in allusions to maroon states in the Americas than on his African home-ground. Mr. Green’s quest for the origins of what he calls modernity is probably doomed. I wish he showed more interest in the cultural divergences that might explain differences among West African peoples’ responses to Islam, Christianity and European empires. He evinces no awareness of how energy shortages—such as the great global fat crisis of the 19th century—affected West Africa’s palm-oil producing regions. But the author’s command of the evidence, depth of reflection and vigilance against error are astonishing for so big a book on so challenging a subject.
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 ... A Fistful of Shells is an antidote to these histories, and to the master narrative of Africa as historical object, rather than subject.
... fascinating and occasionally frustrating ... a rich and insightful work, but occasionally also an unhappy mix. Above all, do not judge this long, dense book by its introduction. Had I not been reviewing it, I might not have read past the beginning, which is often confusing, both in its statements and in its timeline, and I wish that Green had worked some magic on his text and that his editors had cleaned up some of its many repetitions. But I am glad I persevered, for there is much fascination to be had beyond the opening pages ... What emerges is a radically different view of the region from the one that has been generally available.
Green’s prose races to catch up with the information packed inside each sentence and paragraph. He writes that he had enough resources to publish at least three books, and by the end I felt as though I had read that many. So many points of data are presented that it is easy to lose sight of the arc of the argument. It is this compilation, its disciplinary drift, that makes the book uniquely valuable, but also deeply difficult to conceive in terms of traditional historical causation ... This book represents an extraordinary and admirable archival and bibliographic undertaking. In addition to well-known studies of the slave trade, Toby Green cites lesser-known and Africa-derived books and articles, giving equal value to oral and written archives.
Historian Green...won’t disappoint scholarly readers with his dense latest ... meticulously researched ... This valuable history, while written in an accessible style, covers so much historical and theoretical ground that it will be probably be appreciated more by Africanists than a general readership.
