Brokers of Change

Anne Haour, English Historical Review Overall, the collection successfully engages with important themes concerning the creation and maintenance of intercontinental exchanges, and the development of Creole communities. It is possible to overdo concepts such as the Black Atlantic, suggesting a false unity through a perceived shared geography; this book wisely avoids that trap, by gathering particularistic, detailed studies with rich individual biographies, and giving them cohesion through the overarching theme of brokers.

Kenneth Morgan, The Economic History Review Historians of coastal West African societies, of the slave trade, and of transnational interchange within the Atlantic commercial world will find solid evidence and interesting interpretations in these essays. It is clear that the contributors have read each other's work from the intelligent cross-referencing included ... well worth reading.

Mariana Candido, Luso-Brazillian Review This is an important volume, bringing together junior and senior scholars who use new data to bring the debate on brokerage and its cultural and economic relevance into the pre-twentieth-century period...Scholars interested in African, Atlantic, and early modern history must read this significant volume.

Ghislaine Lydon, Early Modern History Brokers of Change is a welcome addition to the under-represented field of pre-colonial Africa that presents Western Africa as a coherent space of insular and riverine connectivity.

<br>Toby Green is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Departments of History and of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, King's College London and an Honorary Fellow of the Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham. He is a director of the Amilcar Cabral Institute for Economic and Political Research, a think-tank dedicated to Guinea-Bissau.<br>

1: AFRICAN-EUROPEAN RELATIONS; 1. Creolization and Creole communities in the Portuguese Atlantic: Sao Tome, Cape Verde and the Rivers of Guinea in comparison; 2. A Motley Company: Differing Identities Among Euro-Africans in Eighteenth-Century Elmina; 2: THE ATLANTIC DIMENSION; 3. 'Into speyne to selle for slavys': English, Spanish and Genoese merchant networks and their involvement with the 'cost of gwynea' trade prior to 1550; 4. Trading with Western Africa: 'Dutch' and Sephardim Insurance, Business and Agency (c. 1590-1674); 5. The French in Senegal: Trials and Tribulations of a Laboratory for " Francite " in the French Atlantic World (17th-19th Centuries); 3: THE INSULAR ATLANTIC; 6. The Earliest Christian Church in the Tropics: Excavation of the N. S. da Conceicao, Cidade Velha, Cape Verde; 7. On the Dutch Presence in 17th-century Senegambia and the Emergence of Papiamentu; 8. The Emergence of a Mixed Cultural Framework in Cape Verde in the 17th-Century; 4: TRADE IN SLAVES AND COMMODITIES; 9. Slavery, Society and the First Steps Towards an Atlantic Revolution in Senegambia Western Africa (XV-XVI Centuries); 10. Bartering for Slaves on the Upper Guinea Coast in the Early Seventeenth Century; 11. "Everyday Commodities, the Rivers of Guinea, and the Atlantic World: The Beeswax Export Trade, c.1450-c.1800"; 5: "POST-SLAVERY"; 12. American Trade with Cabo Verde and Guine, 1820s-1850s: Exploiting the Transition from Slave to legitimate Commerce; 13. "A Commanding Commercial Position": the African settlement of Bolama island and Anglo-Portuguese rivalry (1830-1870); 14. 'Legitimate' traders, the building of empires and the long-term after-affects in Africa; 15. Challenges of the Atlantic voices: A call for recognition, slavery and post slavery in West Africa