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Green Toby . The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300-1589 . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2012. xxvi + 333 pp. ISBN 9781107014367, $109.99 (hardback); ISBN 9781107634718, $32.99 (paper); ISBN 9781139154086, $26.00 (ebook).
Reviews
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...