Chapter 1 Introduction

Brokers of Change

Atlantic Commerce and Cultures in Pre-Colonial Western Africa

Edited by Toby Green

OUP/British Academy

Proceedings of the British Academy

Full analysis of little-studied region
Interdisciplinary and thematic approach within broad timespan
Includes comparisons with other parts of Africa and Americas

Brokers of Change

Atlantic Commerce and Cultures in Pre-Colonial Western Africa

Edited by Toby Green

OUP/British Academy

Proceedings of the British Academy

Description

The Atlantic Ocean, transcending national boundaries as it does, has long been seen as a pivotal site for understanding the way in which local and regional economies and cultural frameworks gradually became integrated into a global system during the early modern era. A key concept that has brought new insight to the study of transnationalism is that of brokerage. Brokers are people who link up different worlds and are at ease in a variety of cultural settings; they have flexibility of outlook and cultural identification. Brokerage can explain and add nuance to the multiple cultural worlds and intense trade characteristics of regions of West Africa.

The essays collected here are by leading scholars in the field of the pre-colonial history of Western Africa (the region between Senegal and Sierra Leone). They span the whole pre-colonial period between the first Portuguese voyages of discovery and the transition to legitimate commerce. The volume offers the first real synthesis of the importance of this region of Africa in the emergence of the Atlantic world between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. It has sections on African-European relations; the Cape Verde islands and wider Atlantic trade; trade in slaves and commodities; and the transition to 'legitimate' commerce. Thus the essays here offer scholars and general readers a real chance to engage with an important part of Africa.

Brokers of Change

Atlantic Commerce and Cultures in Pre-Colonial Western Africa

Edited by Toby Green

OUP/British Academy

Proceedings of the British Academy

1: African-European Relations
1:Creolization and Creole communities in the Portuguese Atlantic: São Tomé, Cape Verde and the Rivers of Guinea in comparison, Gerhard Seibert
2:A Motley Company: Differing Identities Among Euro-Africans in Eighteenth-Century Elmina, Natalie Everts
2: The Atlantic Dimension
3:'Into speyne to selle for slavys': English, Spanish and Genoese merchant networks and their involvement with the 'cost of gwynea' trade prior to 1550, Heather Dalton
4:Trading with Western Africa: 'Dutch' and Sephardim Insurance, Business and Agency (c. 1590-1674), Filipa Ribeiro da Silva
5:The French in Senegal: Trials and Tribulations of a Laboratory for « Francité » in the French Atlantic World (17th-19th Centuries), Ibrahima Seck
3: The Insular Atlantic
6:The Earliest Christian Church in the Tropics: Excavation of the N.ª S.ª da Conceição, Cidade Velha, Cape Verde, Chris Evans; Marie-Louise Sorensen; Konstantin Richter
7:On the Dutch Presence in 17th-century Senegambia and the Emergence of Papiamentu, Bart Jacobs
8:The Emergence of a Mixed Cultural Framework in Cape Verde in the 17th-Century, Toby Green
4: Trade in Slaves and Commodities
9:Slavery, Society and the First Steps Towards an Atlantic Revolution in Senegambia Western Africa (XV-XVI Centuries), Antonio de Almeida Mendes
10:Bartering for Slaves on the Upper Guinea Coast in the Early Seventeenth Century, Linda A. Newson
11:"Everyday Commodities, the Rivers of Guinea, and the Atlantic World: The Beeswax Export Trade, c.1450-c.1800", Michael Tuck
5: "Post-Slavery"
12:American Trade with Cabo Verde and Guine, 1820s-1850s: Exploiting the Transition from Slave to legitimate Commerce, George E. Brooks
13:"A Commanding Commercial Position": the African settlement of Bolama island and Anglo-Portuguese rivalry (1830-1870), Philip J. Havik
14:'Legitimate' traders, the building of empires and the long-term after-affects in Africa, Marika Sherwood
15:Challenges of the Atlantic voices: A call for recognition, slavery and post slavery in West Africa, José Lingna Nafafé

Brokers of Change

Atlantic Commerce and Cultures in Pre-Colonial Western Africa

Edited by Toby Green

OUP/British Academy

Proceedings of the British Academy

Author Information

Edited by Toby Green, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, King's College London

Toby Green is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Departments of History and of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, King's College London and an Honorary Fellow of the Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham. He is a director of the Amilcar Cabral Institute for Economic and Political Research, a think-tank dedicated to Guinea-Bissau.

Contributors:

Antonio de Almeida Mendes, Department of History, University of Nantes
George E. Brooks, University of Indiana-Bloomington
Heather Dalton, Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne
Chris Evans, Cambridge Archaeological Unit, University of Cambridge
Natalie Everts, Department of History, University of Leiden
Toby Green, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Departments of History and of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, King's College London
Philip J. Havik, Senior Researcher, Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical, Lisbon.
Bart Jacobs, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) Munich
José Lingna Nafafé, Lecturer in Sociology, University of Birmingham
Linda A. Newson, Department of Geography, King's College London
Konstantin Richter, Jean Piaget University
Gerhard Seibert, Centro de Estudos Africanos, ISCTE, Lisbon.
Marika Sherwood, Institute for Commonwealth Studies
Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation (WISE), University of Hull
Ibrahima Seck, Department of History, University of Dakar
Marie-Louise Sorensen, Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge
Michael Tuck, Department of History, Northeastern Illinois University

Brokers of Change

Atlantic Commerce and Cultures in Pre-Colonial Western Africa

Edited by Toby Green

OUP/British Academy

Proceedings of the British Academy

Reviews and Awards

"Overall, the collection successfully engages with important themes concerning the creation and maintenance of intercontinental exchanges, and the development of Creole communities. It is possible to overdo concepts such as the Black Atlantic, suggesting a false unity through a perceived shared geography; this book wisely avoids that trap, by gathering particularistic, detailed studies with rich individual biographies, and giving them cohesion through the overarching theme of brokers." - Anne Haour, English Historical Review

"Historians of coastal West African societies, of the slave trade, and of transnational interchange within the Atlantic commercial world will find solid evidence and interesting interpretations in these essays. It is clear that the contributors have read each other's work from the intelligent cross-referencing included ... well worth reading." - Kenneth Morgan, The Economic History Review

"This is an important volume, bringing together junior and senior scholars who use new data to bring the debate on brokerage and its cultural and economic relevance into the pre-twentieth-century period...Scholars interested in African, Atlantic, and early modern history must read this significant volume." - Mariana Candido, Luso-Brazillian Review

"Brokers of Change is a welcome addition to the under-represented field of pre-colonial Africa that presents Western Africa as a coherent space of insular and riverine connectivity." - Ghislaine Lydon, Early Modern History