Author: Toby Green File Type: epub By the time the Scramble for Africa among European colonial powers began in the late nineteenth century, Africa had already been globally connected for centuries. Its gold had fueled the economies of Europe and the Islamic world for nearly a millennium, and the sophisticated kingdoms spanning its west coast had traded with Europeans since the fifteenth century. Until at least 1650, this was a trade of equals, using a variety of currenciesmost importantly, cowrie shells imported from the Maldives and nzimbu shells imported from Brazil. But, as the slave trade grew, African kingdoms began to lose prominence in the growing global economy. We have been living with the effects of this shift ever since.With A Fistful of Shells, Toby Green transforms our view of West and West-Central Africa by reconstructing the world of these kingdoms, which revolved around trade, diplomacy, complex religious beliefs, and the production of art. Green shows how the slave trade led to economic disparities that caused African kingdoms to lose relative political and economic power. The concentration of money in the hands of Atlantic elites in and outside these kingdoms brought about a revolutionary nineteenth century in Africa, parallel to the upheavals then taking place in Europe and America. Yet political fragmentation following the fall of African aristocracies produced radically different results as European colonization took hold.Drawing not just on written histories, but on archival research in nine countries, art, oral history, archaeology, and letters, Green lays bare the transformations that have shaped world politics and the global economy since the fifteenth century and paints a new and masterful portrait of West Africa, past and present. Review This meticulously researched book, based on archival research in nine countries, lays out a comprehensive overview of the economic history of West Africa and West-Central Africa before and after the slave trade. . . . Avaluable history written in an accessible style. (Publishers Weekly) His book is a work of staggering scholarship, drawing on previously untapped sources locked away in European vaults and historical records which, taken as a whole, contradict the age-old perceptions foisted on Africa. (Telegraph UK) This impressive and welcome book engages with the new wave of studies on African economic history and places African societies at the center of global events. Green interrogates and historicizes state failure, violence, corruption, military ideologies, commodification, and globalization, convincingly arguing that roots of many of the current political and economic problems in Africa lie in the past. It is timely, relevant, and necessary in todays political and economic environment. (Mariana Candido, University of Notre Dame) A rich and insightful work. . . . What emerges is a radically different view of the region from the one that has been generally available. West Africa, according to Green, was both cosmopolitan in its outlook, culturally and politically sophisticated and in some ways globally connected long before Europeans arrived to civilise the natives. . . . Green concludes by pointing to the lack of history being taught in schools and universities in West Africa and elsewhere if it is taught at all, it tends to focus on the slave trade. A Fistful of Shells shows that there was so much more, and of so much relevance when looking at the issues of our own time. (Spectator) Toby Greens transformative book repositions West African history in an entirely new light. It brings into focus the regions fundamental place in shapingthe modern world as well as the powerful and also difficult legacy of this today. (Paul Reid, director, Black Cultural Archives ) The range and depth of this book is simply stunning. By masterfully drawing on primary research and secondary sources in multiple languages, Green delivers a provocative book that is also a landmark of historical imagination and craftsmanship. (Roquinaldo Ferreira, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania ) Very seldom do I pick up a history book and wish I had written it myself. Toby Greens Fistful of Shells is one such book. Brilliantly conceptualized, beautifully written, Fistful of Shells breaks with colonially configured regional boundarieswhich work to re-create unintended silos of knowledgeto imagine a West and West Central African Atlantic era history of money, power, religion, and inequality that is as rich as it is sound. (Nwando Achebe, Jack and Margaret Sweet Endowed Professor of History, Michigan State University) A magisterial, extensive and fresh account of the history of West Africa that rewrites the region and its peoples back into World History, where they belong. (Miranda Kaufmann, author of Black Tudors)

Author: Frédéric Brun File Type: pdf Perla is the story of a woman who lived through the horrors of the Holocaust and would ultimately die unable to extricate herself from its corrosive memory. It is told from the point of view of her son, who, not long after losing her, learns that he is about to become a father. These two events become the impetus for reconstructing Perlas past and for understanding gestation, as hes equally in the dark about what happened in his mothers life and what is taking place in his wifes womb. Strangely, at this time he finds himself drawn to the poets Novalis, Holderlin, and Schlegel, and the painter Caspar David Friedrichfounders of German romanticism who strove to capture the spiritual essence of the world. With and through them, he seeks peace and grapples with the question How could Germany produce both the purest poetry and the most complete barbarity? Winner of Frances Goncourt Prize for a first novel, Frederic Bruns semiautobiographical novel considers the seemingly irreconcilable multiplicities of lifepast and present, personal and collective, self and other, life and death. **