100 books like The Art of Conversion

Toby Green’s book is a magisterial history of West Africa and West Central Africa during the era of the Atlantic slave trade.

Exploring a large array of sources from three continents the book tells the history of African societies such as the kingdoms of Kongo and Dahomey, by showing how Africa was connected to the rest of the world earlier before Europeans reached the Atlantic coasts of the continent.

With the rise of the Atlantic slave trade Africa exported currencies such as gold, whose great value persisted over time, but kept importing cloth, cowries, iron, and copper, whose value decreased over time.

The book helps us to understand the roots of the inequalities among Africa and the Global North and shows us that these unbalanced economic and diplomatic exchanges were tied to cultural, religious, and artistic dimensions, in which material culture also played a central role.

Colleen Kriger illuminates the commercial exchanges between European and Africans in the Upper Guinea Coast, a region covering present-day Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, between 1680 and 1715.

Explaining how these economic exchanges relied on existing West African trading routes, Kriger examines the role of England’s Royal African Company which lead the trade of enslaved Africans in the region.

West African commodity currencies such as bar iron, cloth, and cowry shells were carefully organized in bundles that became unities of measure and exchange in the Upper Guinea trade external trade in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

She underscores the cultural norms underlying economic exchanges. For example, exchanging gifts to start and continue the trade was a central protocol. Kriger’s book ultimately shows that the trade in people was shaped by the creation and exchange of things.

Mariana Candido’s book brings to light the importance of land ownership among West Central Africans, by contesting the work of historians who up to here have basically agreed with the claims of European conquerors and colonizers who stated that West Central African land was plentiful and empty, therefore available to be occupied by the newcomers.

Drawing on detailed archival research, the book also us how West Central African men and women acquired and owned land and movable property. Candido brings to light how West Central African communities were consumers of European and Asian goods, and therefore connected to other parts of the world.

The book shows how men and women in Angola accumulated wealth, and also how during the rise of colonialism they were deprived of this wealth.  

Objects intended to protect African men and women and their descendants were also part of the rich material culture of the Atlantic slave trade.

In this book, art historian Matthew Rarey explores the history of mandinga pouches, small amulets containing a variety of items such as Islamic prayers, herbs, shells, and hair. The book shows that these items were not at all insignificant things, but rather tangible traces of the histories of men, women, and children who were forcibly transported to the Americas and whose trajectories linked European, African, and American spiritual and material worlds. 

When I started researching the slave trade in the mid-2000s, there wasn’t a great deal of historical work that examined the realities of the trade for its enslaved victims, nor the merchants who organized it.

I therefore had to turn to Barry Unsworth’s exceptional 1993 novel Sacred Hunger, to gain insight into the slave trade’s gruesome realities. Unsworth undertook deep historical research before writing Sacred Hunger, which examines the fictional slaving voyage of the Liverpool Merchant.

The novel vividly exposes the violence, misery, and death that was at the trade’s core, as well as enslaved people’s constant attempts to resist their captivity. He also paints an accurate portrait of slaving merchants’ chilling rationality and “Sacred Hunger” for personal profit, regardless of what achieving that ambition costs in human lives.

An invaluable scholarly source for understanding the Atlantic slave system at its source.  Among the book’s virtues are details of the cultures and politics in the area of European penetration and African slavery itself and the African participation in the European trade. This book should be recognized with the extensive literature on the Atlantic slave trade for its acknowledgment of the great range of African languages and cultures that ended up in Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America.

There are thousands of histories of Africa, but only this one ties together environment, economy, demography, and society. In just 300 pages Iliffe presents Africa’s history from the birth of humankind to the mid-1990s. His history of Africa is the story of hardship and social adjustment in which population numbers are not just the result of variable, though mostly unfavourable, environmental situations, but a tool of survival and progress. This social adjustability, different as it may be from European patterns, allowed the continent’s people to build one of the greatest civilisations on earth. It carried them through natural disasters, invasions, the slave trade, and colonial brutalities, but it struggles with the present pace of demographic expansion – the result of modern medicine and globalisation. 

This was a pioneering book, gathering essays about British country houses and their connections to transatlantic slavery. The introduction–explaining the book’s concept and evidence base—neatly epitomizes what country houses symbolize in people’s imaginations and focuses on why and in what ways these places are connected to the empire.

The essays that follow are accessible but really detailed, and the essay collection really ends up defining the historical field.

Blonde Roots reimagines the transatlantic slave trade. In this world, Africans are the ones enslaving Europeans, and shipping them to “Afrika.”

The provocative reversal of roles is a gateway to discussing issues of race, identity, capitalism, notions of beauty, and the legacy of slavery.

Humorous and thought-provoking, this novel is one that stays with you for all the ways it challenges its readers.

By exploring the intertwined transatlantic trades of enslaved Africans and alcohol, Curto reveals how Latin American libations bested European stock in ways that altered the course of history.

West Africans’ taste for Brazilian cachaça (sugarcane brandy) dislodged Portuguese wine and liquor facilitating Brazilian merchants’ dominance in Western Africa and spawning a vibrant trade based out of Luanda. What impressed me most about this book was how Curto turned conventional wisdom on its head by demonstrating how a Latin American nation shaped trade and tastes across the globe.

Portuguese efforts to regain their privileged trading position by outlawing the sale of cachaça in Africa failed. The direct trade between Africa and Brazil that alcohol facilitated challenges traditional descriptions of the transatlantic triangle trade.