OK, so it isn't that simple, but the central argument of this magnificent book is. Ignore the detail for a moment. Ignore the way in which Green rehistoricises Africa. Ignore the dense economic arguments against just for a moment. West Africa has been rendered one of the poorest areas on earth as a result of several factors: the differeing values between traders of Europe and Africa; the shift of surplus labour through the slave trades of the Sahara and the Atlantic; and the unrest caused by the above.
I have oversimplified there, in my way. The story as a whole is much more complex, and yet it is not. European traders arrived in the fifteenth century and traded in various currencies - including cowries - in exchange for gold. Surplus capital accumulated in Europe, moving away from Africa. Imports to Africa of European cloth undermined the African economy, which valued things based on utility rather than capital value. As the economy was undermined, with locally-made goods being replaced by traded European goods, the thing with the greatest capital value was the labour of local men and women - who all too often found themselves captured and enslaved.
Add to that, many West African societies used a wide range of currencies not based on gold, as the dominant economic system in use today does. Cowries were valuable, as were strips of cloth and bars of iron and copper. Those bars of iron and copper could then be worked into something of practical use. Their value, once again, was in utility and not capital. Almost by accident, Europe accumulated the capital that would allow it to set the agenda on an economic level in the centuries following these trades.
Green's work is both accessible and acadamic. He builds these arguments over almost 500 pages, but he rarely forgets another of his central arguments: Africa has been largely made ahistorical by Western historians. In the introcution, his disdain for such thinking is made clear. Africa has been ignored by mainstream Western historians for years; these are people who have often seen Africa as an unchanging place, dominated by the same forces in 1800 as it was in 1000. What Green does is show decisively the shifts in political, social and economic fabrics that make up Africa, showing both the diversity of West Africa and the region-wide forces that acted on its history, from the Islam-influenced Senegambian region to the south of the area, the growing polities of Dahomey (as a result, in no small part, of the transatlantic slave trade) and Benin.
It's rare that a book truly broadens or challenges my own understanding, but like most white British people I know - or knew - very little of the historical forces that came to create modern West Africa, left it impoverished by a lack of economic capital due to the differing values with the European traders who took advantage of this difference, and who would in time subject it to the evils and depradations of the slave trade.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough. A Fistful of Shells is a single-volume masterwork of modern history that can act both as a primer for the uninitiated, and as a compelling argument for someone who may have a little more knowledge. It is a challenge to the Western world to consider more than just European history, and it successfully re-historicises an Africa that had been lost in the mists of our own ignorance.
