Toby Green
Biographic Data
| ID | 3611767 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Toby Green |
| GIVEN NAMES | Toby |
| FAMILY NAME | Green |
| SIGNATURE | GREEN T |
| AFFILIATIONS | King's College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6296-5834 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 46 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The Covid-19 Pandemic Response and the New Era of Austerity in Africa
Since 2020, Africa has experienced two severe external economic shocks: the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and the war in Ukraine. These events have ushered in what economists call a new era of austerity, which has been called Structural Adjustment 2.0. This article contends that the major cause of the economic distress following the COVID-19 experience was not the disease itself but the policy response. This response was designed f…
Doing Precolonial African History in Postcolonial Times
This debate article aims to promote a historiographical discussion on the place of Africa in Atlantic and imperial history. The debate revolves around a set of questions: how to bring Africa to the centre of historical research? How close or how distant is the historiography that focuses on the African continent and the one that deals with the African diasporas? What has been the contribution of Portuguese scholarship to the study of precolonial …
The Historical Lecture
The oral performance of history has been common to many societies from Herodotus and the histories of Beowulf, to the griots of West Africa. The lecture in Western history emerged from these histories of orality, with its name showing the close connection in its origins to reading, and to the lecturer's expertise in that domain. From this starting point, lectures grew to be associated with frameworks of academic authority, as well as markers of c…
Das "mercadorias-moedas" aos empréstimos para o Covid
Este artigo enfoca a questão da África e das desigualdades globais, unindo a pesquisa do passado com a experiência do presente. Argumenta que quadros de endividamento e desigualdades crescentes têm caracterizado a relação do continente africano com a globalização em tempos de crise socioeconômica estrutural. Isso já era verdade no início do período moderno e pode ser visto novamente no quadro macroeconômico dos dois anos da pandemia de covid-19. …
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney—50 Years On
In order to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (HEUA) by the Guyanese historian Walter Rodney, the editors of AEH have decided to commission a series of short essays by scholars to consider the genesis, legacy, and ongoing relevance of Rodney’s book
Africa and Capitalism
In the past two decades, economic history has been marked by an increasing turn toward global frameworks and analyses, but these still tend to omit the African continent prior to the nineteenth century. This article explores this omission beginning with an examination of the historiographical roots of this absence from the perspective of both economic history and African history. From its inception, economics depended on the displacing of African…
The impacts of Covid policy responses in Africa
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Covid-19
This essay begins in the past, with the hope of developing a different way of thinking through the transformations of the present. Many commentators and media outlets have referred to the era of the Covid-19 pandemic as 'unprecedented', but there is nothing unprecedented about a pandemic. What seem unprecedented are the measures which have been taken to control the public, measures that have been implemented via a series of states of emergency: t…
African Voices from the Inquisition, Vol. 1
This book contains some of the richest written material in existence for precolonial West Africa with unique insights into daily life in an Afro-Atlantic coastal trade settlement. Presenting the complete translated and annotated text of the Inquisition trial of Crispina Peres, an African woman born in the Guinea-Bissau region, of a Portuguese father and an African mother, it documents the Portuguese Inquisition's religious persecution of Africans…
O passado e o presente da África e Europa
Resenha de:BENNETT, Herman L.. African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic. Filadélfia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. 240p
Fugitive Modernities
The past two decades have seen numerous studies showing the many ways in which—even in the shadow of slavery—Africans were decisive actors in building modernity in the Americas. These studies have built on theoretical insights from diaspora studies and Paul Gilroy's idea of the black Atlantic to reconceptualize how Africans influenced and constructed Western modernities. This literature has generally examined Africa's historical significance in t…
Sumptuary Laws in Precolonial West Africa
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A Fistful of Shells
Dubbing” precolonial Africa and the Atlantic diaspora
What has passed for historical “knowledge” about precolonial Africa and the diaspora has for centuries been “dubbed” through the lens of foreign observers. The main research findings have been shaped by the concerns of external financial backers, be they the Portuguese crown and Missionary orders in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries or the colonial governments of the twentieth century. This pattern has continued into the twenty-first centur…
Kevin Dawson. Undercurrents of Power
In the introduction to his debut monograph, Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora, Kevin Dawson explains how he arrived at his topic. As a young African American growing up in California, and as a keen surfer, he frequently experienced episodes of racism or prejudice shaped by the preconception that black people did not swim. As he continued his education and then entered graduate school, the manifest historical illitera…
North-South dynamics in academia
In his landmark book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney argued that the irreconcilable contradictions of the colonial system facilitated its collapse (Rodney 1972, 273).We live at a m
Landscapes, Sources and Intellectual Projects of the West African Past
Landscapes, Sources and Intellectual Projects of the West African Past offers a comprehensive assessment of new directions in the historiography of West Africa. With twenty-four chapters by leading researchers in the study of West African history and cultures, the volume examines the main trends in multiple fields including the critical interpretation of Arabic sources; new archaeological surveys of trans-Saharan trade; the discovery of sources i…
The Challenge of Studying Inflation in Precolonial Africa by Klas Rönnbäck – A Response
Following the article by Klas Rönnbäck, this article responds by stressing some key elements missing from the original article. These include the connection of African economic history to world economic history, the question of periodization and economic change, and the issue of currency devaluation in the period in question. The response concludes by posing several questions of the theoretical assumptions made by economists regarding data, and p…
Baculamento or Encomienda
This article examines pan-Atlantic legal jurisdictions in the early Atlantic world to argue that the legal domains of people nominally conquered by Iberian powers are of fundamental importance to understanding the emergence of subjectivities in Atlantic Africa during the era of the slave trade. An analysis of the legal framing of the enco-mienda in Mexico and of categories of slavery in Brazil shows how transformations in the Americas influenced …
Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World
West African Warfare in Bahia and Cuba
In the first decade of the nineteenth century, a jihād began, led by Uthman dān Fodio, a Fulani preacher from the Sokoto region of northern Nigeria. Dān Fodio led Fulani troops in their attacks and conquest of Gobir, Katsina and Kano (the major city in the region) and built a Caliphate which became a major political force across West Africa and endured into the twentieth century. As the Sokoto Caliphate grew, its forces pushed south into Yoruba t…
Africa and the Price Revolution
The past decade has seen much ink spilled on global interconnections in the early modern economy, especially those linking European and Asian economies. But this Eurasian concentration has excluded Africa from the discussion. This article addresses this absence by showing that West and West-Central Africa were integral to the global price revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Considering evidence from West and West-Central Africa…
Beyond an Imperial Atlantic
Journal Article Beyond an Imperial Atlantic: Trajectories of Africans from Upper Guinea and West-Central Africa in the Early Atlantic World Get access Toby Green Toby Green King's College London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 230, Issue 1, February 2016, Pages 91-122, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtv040 Published: 27 February 2016
Freedom’s Debt
This is a book heavily researched in British official parliamentary and state archives which seeks to make a major intervention in ongoing scholarly and public discourses on the history and memorialisation of slavery. William Pettigrew seeks to show that, far from being distinct from the practices and justifications of the slave trade, ideologies of freedom associated with the enlightenment and the expansion of free trade were not only deeply con…
Bouki Fait Gombo
The banks of the Mississippi river have long been recognised as the heart of the American south, with all that that implies. A painful history of plantation slavery grounded in cotton, indigo and rice production characterised the region from its settlement by European colonists in the first half of the eighteenth century until the American Civil War. The condition and transformation of this environment has been studied in many excellent books suc…
Further Considerations on the Sephardim of the Petite Côte
The publication in these pages of an article by Peter Mark and José da Silva Horta on the Sephardic communities of the Petite Côte in the early seventeenth century represents a significant step forward in our understanding of the Jewish presence in west Africa. Using previously unreferenced material, Mark and Horta have filled out for the first time the nature of this community, and in particular provided valuable evidence as to the group's conne…
Building Creole Identity in the African Atlantic
The Atlantic may be a vast ocean for the most part devoid of human life, but that is not how historians see it. As the historian of the British Atlantic world David Armitage put it, "we are all Atlanticists now." Not a little of the excitement of the historical profession has turned on the need to construct broad and transnational perspectives for the exchanges of peoples and goods which have constructed modern worlds. This is, as every reader of…
North-South dynamics in academia
In his landmark book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney argued that the irreconcilable contradictions of the colonial system facilitated its collapse (Rodney 1972, 273).We live at a m
Africa and the Price Revolution
The past decade has seen much ink spilled on global interconnections in the early modern economy, especially those linking European and Asian economies. But this Eurasian concentration has excluded Africa from the discussion. This article addresses this absence by showing that West and West-Central Africa were integral to the global price revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Considering evidence from West and West-Central Africa…
Policing the Empires
This paper examines aspects of the political and social functions of the Inquisition in the overseas colonies of Portugal and Spain as they emerge through archival sources. The discourse of power is of course vital in understanding how the Inquisition operates; and its global expressions of power are also local expressions of power. By understanding how and if the Inquisition was used as a policing mechanism of the political and ideological devel…
Baculamento or Encomienda
This article examines pan-Atlantic legal jurisdictions in the early Atlantic world to argue that the legal domains of people nominally conquered by Iberian powers are of fundamental importance to understanding the emergence of subjectivities in Atlantic Africa during the era of the slave trade. An analysis of the legal framing of the enco-mienda in Mexico and of categories of slavery in Brazil shows how transformations in the Americas influenced …
Beyond an Imperial Atlantic
Journal Article Beyond an Imperial Atlantic: Trajectories of Africans from Upper Guinea and West-Central Africa in the Early Atlantic World Get access Toby Green Toby Green King's College London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 230, Issue 1, February 2016, Pages 91-122, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtv040 Published: 27 February 2016
Landscapes, Sources and Intellectual Projects of the West African Past
Landscapes, Sources and Intellectual Projects of the West African Past offers a comprehensive assessment of new directions in the historiography of West Africa. With twenty-four chapters by leading researchers in the study of West African history and cultures, the volume examines the main trends in multiple fields including the critical interpretation of Arabic sources; new archaeological surveys of trans-Saharan trade; the discovery of sources i…
Building Slavery in the Atlantic World
This paper analyses the early institutionalisation of slavery in the Cabo Verde islands. It is shown that initially slavery in Cabo Verde borrowed heavily from existing practices and ideologies in Iberia, in which slavery was legitimated through religious discrimination. However, the pivotal early role of the archipelago in the transatlantic slave trade meant that practices changed according to Atlantic factors. The frequent exchanges between Cab…
Africa and Capitalism
In the past two decades, economic history has been marked by an increasing turn toward global frameworks and analyses, but these still tend to omit the African continent prior to the nineteenth century. This article explores this omission beginning with an examination of the historiographical roots of this absence from the perspective of both economic history and African history. From its inception, economics depended on the displacing of African…
Dubbing” precolonial Africa and the Atlantic diaspora
What has passed for historical “knowledge” about precolonial Africa and the diaspora has for centuries been “dubbed” through the lens of foreign observers. The main research findings have been shaped by the concerns of external financial backers, be they the Portuguese crown and Missionary orders in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries or the colonial governments of the twentieth century. This pattern has continued into the twenty-first centur…
Bouki Fait Gombo
The banks of the Mississippi river have long been recognised as the heart of the American south, with all that that implies. A painful history of plantation slavery grounded in cotton, indigo and rice production characterised the region from its settlement by European colonists in the first half of the eighteenth century until the American Civil War. The condition and transformation of this environment has been studied in many excellent books suc…
Silent Trade
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Fear and Atlantic History
The history of the Atlantic necessarily encompasses a permanent dialogue with fear, but analysis of this fear is often absent from many historical discussions. Historical documentation is difficult to cite in such an analysis, as human nature often prevents people from writing of their fears. Yet the slightest pause for reflection confirms the importance of grasping the role of fear if the historical changes that accompanied the Age of Discovery …
Further Considerations on the Sephardim of the Petite Côte
The publication in these pages of an article by Peter Mark and José da Silva Horta on the Sephardic communities of the Petite Côte in the early seventeenth century represents a significant step forward in our understanding of the Jewish presence in west Africa. Using previously unreferenced material, Mark and Horta have filled out for the first time the nature of this community, and in particular provided valuable evidence as to the group's conne…
Fear and Atlantic History
The history of the Atlantic necessarily encompasses a permanent dialogue with fear, but analysis of this fear is often absent from many historical discussions. Historical documentation is difficult to cite in such an analysis, as human nature often prevents people from writing of their fears. Yet the slightest pause for reflection confirms the importance of grasping the role of fear if the historical changes that accompanied the Age of Discovery …
Building Creole Identity in the African Atlantic
The Atlantic may be a vast ocean for the most part devoid of human life, but that is not how historians see it. As the historian of the British Atlantic world David Armitage put it, "we are all Atlanticists now." Not a little of the excitement of the historical profession has turned on the need to construct broad and transnational perspectives for the exchanges of peoples and goods which have constructed modern worlds. This is, as every reader of…
The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589
The region between the river Senegal and Sierra Leone saw the first trans-Atlantic slave trade in the sixteenth century. Drawing on many new sources, Toby Green challenges current quantitative approaches to the history of the slave trade. New data on slave origins can show how and why Western African societies responded to Atlantic pressures. Green argues that answering these questions requires a cultural framework and uses the idea of creolizati…
Building Slavery in the Atlantic World
This paper analyses the early institutionalisation of slavery in the Cabo Verde islands. It is shown that initially slavery in Cabo Verde borrowed heavily from existing practices and ideologies in Iberia, in which slavery was legitimated through religious discrimination. However, the pivotal early role of the archipelago in the transatlantic slave trade meant that practices changed according to Atlantic factors. The frequent exchanges between Cab…
Policing the Empires
This paper examines aspects of the political and social functions of the Inquisition in the overseas colonies of Portugal and Spain as they emerge through archival sources. The discourse of power is of course vital in understanding how the Inquisition operates; and its global expressions of power are also local expressions of power. By understanding how and if the Inquisition was used as a policing mechanism of the political and ideological devel…
Brokers of Change
This book, which provides a collection from scholars in the field of the precolonial history of Western Africa (the region between Senegal and Sierra Leone), aims to bring the history of the region to wider historical attention. It spans the whole pre-colonial period between the first Portuguese voyages of discovery and the transition to legitimate commerce in the 19th century, and as a whole offers a synthesis of the importance of this region of…
Brokers of Change
A collection of essays focusing on pre-colonial trade and African-European interaction, this book spans the whole pre-colonial period between the first Portuguese voyages of discovery and the transition to legitimate commerce in the 19th century.
From Africa to Brazil
Journal Article From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity and an Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1830, by Walter Hawthorne Get access From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity and an Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1830, by Walter Hawthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2010; pp. xxi + 249. £55; pb. £17.99). Toby Green Toby Green King’s College London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume…
The export of rice and millet from Upper Guinea into the sixteenth-century Atlantic trade
Commercial Agriculture, the Slave Trade & Slavery in Atlantic Africa
Re-envisages what we know about African political economies through its examination of one of the key questions in colonial and African history, that of commercial agriculture and its relationship to slavery. This book considers commercial agriculture in Africa in relation to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the institution of slavery within Africa itself, from the beginnings of European maritime trade in the fifteenth century to theearly stage…
Silent Trade
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Intercourse and Crosscurrents in the Atlantic World
Reviewed by: Intercourse and Crosscurrents in the Atlantic World: Calabar-British experience, 17th-20th centuries by David Lishilinimle Imbua Toby Green David Lishilinimle Imbua , Intercourse and Crosscurrents in the Atlantic World: Calabar-British experience, 17th-20th centuries. Durham NC: Carolina Academic Press (pb $30 - 978 1 61163 006 0). 2012, 210pp. Calabar's history is inextricably intertwined with its geographical position at the interf…
The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, by Rebecca Shumway
Journal Article The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, by Rebecca Shumway Get access The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, by Rebecca Shumway (Rochester, NY: U. of Rochester P., 2011; pp. 232. £40). Toby Green Toby Green King’s College London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 536, February 2014, Pages 217–219, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cet331 Pu…
David Lambert. Mastering the Niger
Freedom’s Debt
This is a book heavily researched in British official parliamentary and state archives which seeks to make a major intervention in ongoing scholarly and public discourses on the history and memorialisation of slavery. William Pettigrew seeks to show that, far from being distinct from the practices and justifications of the slave trade, ideologies of freedom associated with the enlightenment and the expansion of free trade were not only deeply con…
Bouki Fait Gombo
The banks of the Mississippi river have long been recognised as the heart of the American south, with all that that implies. A painful history of plantation slavery grounded in cotton, indigo and rice production characterised the region from its settlement by European colonists in the first half of the eighteenth century until the American Civil War. The condition and transformation of this environment has been studied in many excellent books suc…
Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World
West African Warfare in Bahia and Cuba
In the first decade of the nineteenth century, a jihād began, led by Uthman dān Fodio, a Fulani preacher from the Sokoto region of northern Nigeria. Dān Fodio led Fulani troops in their attacks and conquest of Gobir, Katsina and Kano (the major city in the region) and built a Caliphate which became a major political force across West Africa and endured into the twentieth century. As the Sokoto Caliphate grew, its forces pushed south into Yoruba t…
Africa and the Price Revolution
The past decade has seen much ink spilled on global interconnections in the early modern economy, especially those linking European and Asian economies. But this Eurasian concentration has excluded Africa from the discussion. This article addresses this absence by showing that West and West-Central Africa were integral to the global price revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Considering evidence from West and West-Central Africa…
Beyond an Imperial Atlantic
Journal Article Beyond an Imperial Atlantic: Trajectories of Africans from Upper Guinea and West-Central Africa in the Early Atlantic World Get access Toby Green Toby Green King's College London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 230, Issue 1, February 2016, Pages 91-122, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtv040 Published: 27 February 2016
The Challenge of Studying Inflation in Precolonial Africa by Klas Rönnbäck – A Response
Following the article by Klas Rönnbäck, this article responds by stressing some key elements missing from the original article. These include the connection of African economic history to world economic history, the question of periodization and economic change, and the issue of currency devaluation in the period in question. The response concludes by posing several questions of the theoretical assumptions made by economists regarding data, and p…
Baculamento or Encomienda
This article examines pan-Atlantic legal jurisdictions in the early Atlantic world to argue that the legal domains of people nominally conquered by Iberian powers are of fundamental importance to understanding the emergence of subjectivities in Atlantic Africa during the era of the slave trade. An analysis of the legal framing of the enco-mienda in Mexico and of categories of slavery in Brazil shows how transformations in the Americas influenced …
Landscapes, Sources and Intellectual Projects of the West African Past
Landscapes, Sources and Intellectual Projects of the West African Past offers a comprehensive assessment of new directions in the historiography of West Africa. With twenty-four chapters by leading researchers in the study of West African history and cultures, the volume examines the main trends in multiple fields including the critical interpretation of Arabic sources; new archaeological surveys of trans-Saharan trade; the discovery of sources i…
Sumptuary Laws in Precolonial West Africa
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
History (32 works) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade (27 works) · Political science (24 works) · History (22 works) · Geography (18 works) · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories (18 works) · Ancient history (16 works) · Ethnology (15 works) · Law (15 works) · Sociology (15 works)