Academic
Toby Green is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Departments of History and of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at King's College London. He is also Honorary Fellow at the Centre of West African Studies (CWAS), University of Birmingham, and from 2007 to 2010 he was previously a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at CWAS.
His research focuses on early Atlantic history and the development of a "pan-Atlantic" linking Africa, the Americas and Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. His doctoral and postdoctoral work focused on trans-national networks and contacts in the early Atlantic, resulting in a book on the rise of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the 15th and 16th centuries, the first detailed work on this subject. The book will be published by Cambridge University Press in late 2011. Since completing this project, he has begun his Leverhulme-funded research on a comparative history of Angola and Upper Guinea in the 17th century, looking at their relationship with Atlantic empires.
He trained in Philosophy at Cambridge University, where he graduated with a double first in 1996. He then began his PhD programme in history at Birmingham in 2002, and was awarded his PhD in 2007 on the subject of creolization among Africans and New Christians (converted Jews) in the Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau region in the 16th and 17th centuries. The thesis also dealt extensively with early trans-Atlantic networks linking Iberia, West Africa and the Americas.
Toby Green's research interests encompass the histories of creolization, empire, race and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. His work is based on research in archives in Cape Verde, Chile, Colombia, Gambia, Holland, Portugal, Spain, the Vatican and the UK, and on the long periods which he has spent in the areas related to his research. He has given seminars and public lectures at the Universities of Cambridge, Duke, Michigan, Oxford, the Centre des Etudes des Mondes Africaines at Paris-Sorbonne/Pantheon, at the British Academy, the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and at the Instituto de Investigação Cientifica Tropical in Lisbon. Together with his colleague at Birmingham, Dr Jose Lingna Nafafe, in 2009 he organised a major international conference, Brokers of Change, which drew world experts on the precolonial Atlantic history of the "Upper Guinea" (between Senegal and Sierra Leone) region for a 3-day colloquium at Birmingham University. An edited volume of essays from this conference is currently in preparation.
He is the author of numerous scholarly publications:
Articles in Scholarly Journals:
:- Slavery and Abolition (32/2) (2011), 228-45: "Building Slavery in the Atlantic World: Atlantic Connections and the Changing Institution of Slavery in Cabo Verde, 15th-16th Centuries"
:- History in Africa (36) 2009, 103-25: "Building Creole Identity in the African Atlantic: Boundaries of Race and Religion in 17th Century Cabo Verde"
:- Blogue História Lusófona, Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical, http://www2.iict.pt/?idc=102&idi=13327, June 2008: “Os Cristãos-Novos e a Crioulização em Cabo Verde e nos Rios da Guiné, Séculos XVI-XVII”
:- Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 34, no. 2, 2008, 456-458: Review article: Environment and Empire by William Beinart and Lotte Hughes.
:- Melilah, (12), no.1, 2008, 1-12: “Equal Partners? Proselytising by Africans and Jews in the 17th Century Atlantic Diaspora”
:- Journal of Atlantic Studies (3), no.1, 2006, 25-42: “Fear and Atlantic History: Some Observations Derived from the History of the Cape Verde Islands and the African Atlantic”.
:- History in Africa (32) 2005, 165-183: “Further Considerations on the Sephardim of the Petite Côte”.
Chapters in Edited Books
:- "The Evolution of Creole Identity in Cape Verde", in The Creolization Reader: Studies in Mixed Identities and Cultures, eds. Robin Cohen and Paola Toninato (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 157-66.
:- "Amsterdam and the African Atlantic : The Role of Sephardim from Amsterdam in Senegal in the 17th Century", in Proceedings of the 14th British Judaeo-Spanish Conference, eds. Hilary Pomeroy, Christopher Pountain and Elena Romero (London: Queen Mary and Westfierld College, 2008), 85-94.
:- “ ‘E se mais mundo houvera, lá chegara’. La Région du Cap Vert, Première Tentative de Colonisation Portugaise Ouest-africaine à l’Aube de la Grande Traite Atlantique (XVe-XIXe Siècles)”, in Colonisations au Sahara et au Sahel, eds. Mariella Villasante Cervello and Christophe Beauvais (Paris : Éditions L’Harmattan, 2007), Vol. 1 : 363-90.
:- “The Role of the Portuguese Trading Posts in Guinea and Angola in the ‘Apostasy’ of Crypto-Jews in the 17th Century”, in Creole Societies in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, eds. Philip J. Havik and Malyn Newitt (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2007), 25-40.
In addition, his book Inquisition: The Reign of Fear (Macmillan, 2007) was well-reviewed by scholars as well as by the mainstream press.
Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, Dr Malcolm Gaskill of the University of East Anglia, wrote: "There is much in Toby Green’s engrossing parable of persecution that is unexpected…Green is a sensitive and disciplined historian, who eloquently recovers lost stories, experiences and emotions from these yellowing, crumbling files…Green’s subject-matter may seem archaic, but his message is frighteningly modern”
In the Daily Telegraph, Professor Jeremy Black of Exeter University, wrote:
“Drawing on a range of archival research, [Green] offers a series of pertinent, well-written episodes that leave us in no doubt that the Inquisition's activities were marked by considerable cruelty…This thoughtful book warns us of the dangers of a system of conviction that persecutes those who do not share its values.”
Meanwhile, Malyn Newitt, Emeritus Professor of History from the Institute for Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at King's College London, wrote in the Anglo-Portuguese Society Newsletter of September 2007:
“A fascinating read – almost impossible to put down once you have started. Moreover it is unusual in that it gives the story of the Inquisition in Portugal as much space as the more famous Spanish Inquisition, and the story moves from Seville and Lisbon to remote areas of South America, Goa, the Canaries and Cape Verde Islands…Part of the fascination of this story derives from the fact that the Inquisition maintained extremely detailed records. As Ladurie showed in his famous study of Montaillou, inquisitorial archives can be used to reconstruct the daily lives of communities in almost photographic detail.”
To find out about Toby Green's monograph, The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in western Africa, 1300-1589 (Cambridge University Press, autumn 2011), click here:
Rise of Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
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The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300-1589
Above: Cidade Velha, Cape Verde: the oldest European-built city in the tropics and first capital of the trans-Atlantic slave trade
Toby Green's book engages with the rise of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in "Western Africa", the region linking the Cape Verde islands to the African coast between the river Gambia and modern Sierra Leone. This was the area which saw the first growth of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the 16th century, and yet this is the first detailed history of the social and cultural realities which accompanied this growth.
Based on years of research, the monograph assesses the development of this process through the idea of creolization, showing how both violence and flexibility were fundamental to the development both of Atlantic slavery and Creole societies. Toby Green argues that pre-existing social characteristics were fundamental in facilitating the cultural adaptability which allowed Africans and Europeans to forge trading networks and Creole societies in the 16th and 17th centuries. Violence may have been essential to the development of the slave trade in the first place, but it also facilitated the development of mixed communities which themselves depended upon some accommodation and cultural flexibility.
Based on archival research in Africa, Europe and Latin America, and on field trips to Cabo Verde, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, and Senegal, the project aims to reposition our understanding of the first African-European exchanges in the 15th and 16th centuries.
Advance praise:
'Many current scholars lay claim to a transnational and cross-cultural 'Atlantic' history but very few have brought together the detail, scope, and vision of Toby Green. This remarkable book, focusing on Cabo Verde, Senegambia, and Upper Guinea, reveals how Iberian imperial authorities, a New Christian/Crypto-Jewish diaspora, and African economic and political agents combined to produce a wide-ranging early modern order of commerce and cultural identity around the violence of the slave trade.' Ralph Austen, University of Chicago
'… original and thoroughly researched … Green recasts our understanding of the early years of Africa's engagement with Atlantic merchants. He 'Africanizes' Atlantic history by showing that a cultural framework established in Africa before the Portuguese 'discoveries' … influenced the nature of African-European exchanges for more than a century … Green crafts a 'culturally centered approach', which stands in contrast to quantitative approaches popular in much recent scholarship. He also shows that a widely held view that a region known as Upper Guinea was relatively unimportant in the early years of Atlantic exchange is incorrect … Well written and well argued, Green's is a story that had to be told.' Walter Hawthorne, Michigan State University, and author of From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity, and an Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1830
'Green's book is learned and wide-ranging. It is also deeply humane and marked by an imaginative empathy of rare quality. The result is one of the best and most rewarding works I have read on the trans-Atlantic slave trade. This is a major contribution to West African and Atlantic history and marks Green as a scholar to watch.' T. C. McCaskie, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
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