Toby Green FBA is a British historian of inequality. He is also a Professor of Precolonial and Lusophone African History and Culture at King's College London. He obtained his Doctor of Philosophy in African studies, at the University of Birmingham. He is Chair of the FontesHistoriae Africanae (Sources of African History) Committee of the British Academy, [1] and has written extensively about African early modern history and colonial African slavery, mainly focused on slavery in the Portuguese colonies.
He has also written on the Spanish Inquisition. [2] Green disagrees with the notion of a Black Legend of the Spanish Inquisition and often quotes sixteenth-century sources, regarding the institution's abuse of power in Latin America, and is often cited regarding this subject. He has other publications regarding the issues of religious prosecution and oppression in Africa and other European colonies. His interests are slavery in the Atlantic and cultural and economic links between America and Africa. [3]
His book, A Fistful of Shells won the 2019 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding. [4] It was a finalist for the 2019 LA Times Book prize, [5] and was shortlisted for the 2019 Cundill History Prize [6] and 2020 Wolfson History Prize. [7]
Green was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2024. [8]
Green addresses the Spanish Inquisition mainly through Hispano-American sources. He notes that the great unchecked power given to inquisitors meant that they were "widely seen as above the law", [9] and sometimes had motives for imprisoning, while sometimes executing alleged offenders other than for the purpose of punishing religious nonconformity, mainly in Ibero-America. [9] [10] [11]
Green, T. 28 Sep 2017 In : Journal of Global Slavery. 2, p. 310-336
A Fistful of Shells by Toby Green review – the west African slave trade - The Guardian
What heart of darkness? Busting myths about West African history - The Telegraph
Interview with Toby Green in QG Media - QG Media
Interview with Toby Green in La Presse du Soir - La Presse du Soir
Interview with Toby Green - Times Higher Education
Three Years on there is a New Generation of Lockdown Sceptics - The Guardian
We Must Change the Way we Understand our History - Big Issue North
The Atlantic slave trade or transatlantic slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of enslaved African people to the Americas. European slave ships regularly used the triangular trade route and its Middle Passage. Europeans established a coastal slave trade in the 15th century and trade to the Americas began in the 16th century, lasting through the 19th century. The vast majority of those who were transported in the transatlantic slave trade were from Central Africa and West Africa and had been sold by West African slave traders to European slave traders, while others had been captured directly by the slave traders in coastal raids. European slave traders gathered and imprisoned the enslaved at forts on the African coast and then brought them to the Americas. Some Portuguese and Europeans participated in slave raids. As the National Museums Liverpool explains: "European traders captured some Africans in raids along the coast, but bought most of them from local African or African-European dealers." Many European slave traders generally did not participate in slave raids because life expectancy for Europeans in sub-Saharan Africa was less than one year during the period of the slave trade because of malaria that was endemic in the African continent. An article from PBS explains: "Malaria, dysentery, yellow fever, and other diseases reduced the few Europeans living and trading along the West African coast to a chronic state of ill health and earned Africa the name 'white man's grave.' In this environment, European merchants were rarely in a position to call the shots." The earliest known use of the phrase began in the 1830s, and the earliest written evidence was found in an 1836 published book by F. H. Rankin. Portuguese coastal raiders found that slave raiding was too costly and often ineffective and opted for established commercial relations.
The Mandinka or Malinke are a West African ethnic group primarily found in southern Mali, The Gambia, southern Senegal and eastern Guinea. Numbering about 11 million, they are the largest subgroup of the Mandé peoples and one of the largest ethnic-linguistic groups in Africa. They speak the Manding languages in the Mande language family, which are a lingua franca in much of West Africa. Virtually all of Mandinka people are adherent to Islam, mostly based on the Maliki jurisprudence. They are predominantly subsistence farmers and live in rural villages. Their largest urban center is Bamako, the capital of Mali.
Sugar plantations in the Caribbean were a major part of the economy of the islands in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. Most Caribbean islands were covered with sugar cane fields and mills for refining the crop. The main source of labor, until the abolition of chattel slavery, was enslaved Africans. After the abolition of slavery, indentured laborers from India, China, Portugal and other places were brought to the Caribbean to work in the sugar industry. These plantations produced 80 to 90 percent of the sugar consumed in Western Europe, later supplanted by European-grown sugar beet.
The Asiento de Negros was a monopoly contract between the Spanish Crown and various merchants for the right to provide enslaved Africans to colonies in the Spanish Americas. The Spanish Empire rarely engaged in the transatlantic slave trade directly from Africa itself, choosing instead to contract out the importation to foreign merchants from nations more prominent in that part of the world, typically Portuguese and Genoese, but later the Dutch, French, and British. The Asiento did not concern French or British Caribbean but Spanish America.
The Royal African Company (RAC) was an English trading company established in 1660 by the House of Stuart and City of London merchants to trade along the West African coast. It was overseen by the Duke of York, the brother of Charles II of England; the RAC was founded after Charles II ascended to the English throne in the 1660 Stuart Restoration, and he granted it a monopoly on all English trade with Africa. While the company's original purpose was to trade for gold in the Gambia River, as Prince Rupert of the Rhine had identified gold deposits in the region during the Interregnum, the RAC quickly began trading in slaves, which became its largest commodity.
The Slave Coast is a historical name formerly used for that part of coastal West Africa along the Bight of Biafra and the Bight of Benin that is located between the Volta River and the Lagos Lagoon. The name is derived from the region's history as a major source of African people sold into slavery during the Atlantic slave trade from the early 16th century to the late 19th century.
Hazel Vivian Carby is Professor Emerita of African American Studies and of American Studies. She served as Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies and American Studies at Yale University.
Slavery in the British and French Caribbean refers to slavery in the parts of the Caribbean dominated by France or the British Empire.
The West Africa Squadron, also known as the Preventative Squadron, was a squadron of the British Royal Navy whose goal was to suppress the Atlantic slave trade by patrolling the coast of West Africa. Formed in 1808 after the British Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act 1807 and based out of Portsmouth, England, it remained an independent command until 1856 and then again from 1866 to 1867.
Hakim Adi is a British historian and scholar who specializes in African affairs. He was the first African-British historian to become a professor of history in the UK when in 2015 he was appointed Professor of the History of Africa and the African Diaspora at the University of Chichester, launching in 2018 the world's first online MRes in the History of Africa and the African Diaspora.
Carole Hillenbrand, is a British Islamic scholar who is Emerita Professor in Islamic History at the University of Edinburgh and Professor of Islamic History at the University of St Andrews. She is the Vice-President of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies and a Member of the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics.
Slavery has historically been widespread in Africa. Systems of servitude and slavery were once commonplace in parts of Africa, as they were in much of the rest of the ancient and medieval world. When the trans-Saharan slave trade, Red Sea slave trade, Indian Ocean slave trade and Atlantic slave trade began, many of the pre-existing local African slave systems began supplying captives for slave markets outside Africa. Slavery in contemporary Africa is still practised despite it being illegal.
Slavery in Britain existed before the Roman occupation and endured until the 11th century, when the Norman conquest of England resulted in the gradual merger of the pre-conquest institution of slavery into serfdom. Given the widespread socio-political changes, all slaves were no longer recognised separately in English law or custom. By the middle of the 12th century, the institution of slavery as it had existed prior to the Norman conquest had fully disappeared, but other forms of unfree servitude continued for some centuries.
Joseph Calder Miller was an American historian and academic. He served at the University of Virginia from 1972 to 2014 as T. Cary Johnson Jr. professor of history, and was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. As a historian, Joseph wrote extensively on the early history of Africa, especially Angola, the Atlantic slave trade, women and slavery, child slavery, Atlantic history, and world history.
Manuel Barcia is Chair of Global History at the University of Leeds, in the United Kingdom.
The Battle of Mbandi Kasi was a military engagement between forces of Portuguese Angola and the Kingdom of Kongo during their first armed conflict which spanned from 1622 to 1623. The battle, while not widely reported by the Portuguese, was recorded in correspondence between the Kongolese and their Dutch allies. The battle marked the turn of the short war in the favor of Kongo and led to the ouster of the Portuguese governor of Luanda and the return of Kongolese subjects taken as slaves in earlier campaigns.
Manuel Batista Perez was a Spanish-born merchant, and multi-millionaire active in Africa, Europe, the Americas and Asia. Though Spanish, Manuel called himself Portuguese because Spanish New Christians were not allowed in the New World. Perez became extremely wealthy, according to the Jewish Encyclopedia, Perez amassed a fortune which would have been the equivalent of $1,000,000 in 1906 Perez moved to Lima with his wife and three children. He was sent with a large sum to invest for his brothers-in-law back in Spain. He was born to a Marrano family, that is to say a Sephardic Jew whose family outwardly conformed to Catholicism for socio-political reasons, but privately practiced Judaism.
Robin C. C. Law is a British Africanist and since 2009 Emeritus Professor of the History of Africa at the University of Stirling. He obtained a BA degree in Literae Humaniores at the University of Oxford in 1967 and a PhD in History at the University of Birmingham in 1972. As a researcher, he worked at the University of Lagos, Nigeria (1966-1969) and at the Centre of West African Studies of the University of Birmingham (1970-1972). He joined the University of Stirling in 1972, and was subsequently Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, and Reader, becoming Professor of African History in 1993. He was a Visiting Fellow at the African Studies Centre Leiden (1993-1994), and a visiting professor at York University, Canada (1996-1997) and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2000-2001). Law received the Distinguished Africanist award of the African Studies Association of the UK for 2010.
The British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding is a prize granted by the British Academy for "outstanding scholarly contributions to global cultural understanding". The prize is £25,000.
Miranda Clare Kaufmann is a British historian, journalist and educator, whose work has focused on Black British history. She is the author of the 2017 book Black Tudors: The Untold Story, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize and the Wolfson History Prize. She is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, where since 2014 she has co-convened the workshop series "What's Happening in Black British History?" with Michael Ohajuru.