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Winner of the Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding 2019 Shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize and the Pius Adesanmi Memorial Award 'Astonishing, staggering' Ben Okri, Daily Telegraph A groundbreaking new history that will transform our view of West Africa By the time of the 'Scramble for Africa' in the late nineteenth century, Africa had already been globally connected for many centuries. Its gold had fuelled the economies of Europe and Islamic world since around 1000, and its sophisticated kingdoms had traded with Europeans along the coasts from Senegal down to Angola since the fifteenth century. Until at least 1650, this was a trade of equals, using a variety of curr...
Why does Western pandemic policy have support across the political spectrum, when its social impacts conflict with ideology on both right and left? During the pandemic, the Left has agreed that ‘following the science’ with hard lockdowns is the best way to preserve life; only irresponsible right-wing populists oppose them. But social science shows that while the rich have got richer, those suffering most under lockdown are the already disadvantaged: the poor, the young, and—most overlooked of all—the Global South. The UN is predicting tens of millions of deaths from hunger and warning that decades of development are being reversed. Equally, why have conservatives backed lockdowns and other major interventions, creating the big state that they usually abhor? These contradictions within the great consensus of Western pandemic response are part of a broader crisis in Western thought. Toby Green peels back the policy paradoxes to reveal irreconcilable beliefs in our societies. These deep divisions are now bursting into the open, with devastating consequences for the global poor.
The region between the river Senegal and Sierra Leone saw the first trans-Atlantic slave trade in the sixteenth century. Drawing on many new sources, Toby Green challenges current quantitative approaches to the history of the slave trade. New data on slave origins can show how and why Western African societies responded to Atlantic pressures. Green argues that answering these questions requires a cultural framework and uses the idea of creolization - the formation of mixed cultural communities in the era of plantation societies - to argue that preceding social patterns in both Africa and Europe were crucial. Major impacts of the sixteenth-century slave trade included political fragmentation, changes in identity and the re-organization of ritual and social patterns. The book shows which peoples were enslaved, why they were vulnerable and the consequences in Africa and beyond.
Landscapes, Sources and Intellectual Projects of the West African Past offers a comprehensive assessment of new directions in the historiography of West Africa. With twenty-four chapters by leading researchers in the study of West African history and cultures, the volume examines the main trends in multiple fields including the critical interpretation of Arabic sources; new archaeological surveys of trans-Saharan trade; the discovery of sources in Latin America relating to pan-Atlantic histories; and the continuing analysis of oral histories. The volume is dedicated to Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias, whose work inspired the intellectual reorientations discussed in its chapters and stands as...
This extensively revised and expanded edition broadens the reach and depth of the permaculture approach for urban and suburban gardeners. The text's message is that working with nature, not against it, results in more beautiful, abundant, and forgiving gardens.
Since 1998 Guinea-Bissau has suffered a series of coups which outside analysts have linked to its emergence as West Africa's first 'narco-state'. Yet what does this mean for the country and the nature of the state in postcolonial Africa? What links Guinea-Bissau's instability with questions of wider regional and global security? What would a stable government look like in Guinea-Bissau, and what are the conditions for its achievement? The book constitutes the first synthetic attempt to grasp the consequences of the crisis in Guinea-Bissau. It fills a void in scholarship and policy analysis with a synthesis of both what has happened in the country and the wider implications for postcolonial A...
In September 1532, eleven years after the Spanish conquest, Mexico is in meltdown. As the conquistadors discover an earthly paradise, its peoples and their Gods are being destroyed. Despairing at his surroundings, Vasco de Quiroga forges a commune on Mexico City's outskirts. Indigenous peoples flock there, and soon a new society exists, using Thomas More's recently published book, Utopia, as its blueprint. Rich with vivid accounts of 16th-century Spain and Mexico, Thomas More's Magician is not only the fascinating story of Quiroga, but also asks if utopian dreams are possible.
An estimated 400 million units of obsolete electronics are scrapped annually in the U.S. Virtualization can save an organization $560 annually in electricity costs per server; this books covers virtualization and other engery-saving techniques A green IT organization can reduce operation costs, increase employee retention, and improve brand image in the market place
Toby Green weaves a mystical narrative of lore and tradition as he searches for, and finds, the secret power of invisibility.Exploring the extraordinarily vibrant spiritual world which underlies the surface of West Africa, this book examines the conflict between the traditional and the modern in a region whose culture is a melting pot of local, Islamic and European influences. Building on local narrative, we hear first-hand the mysterious stories of invulnerability and invisibility retold from the author's own experiences. Engaging the reader with themes as diverse as the histories of the slave trade and the kingdoms of West Africa, the invisible men of HG Wells and Ralph Ellison, Plato's simile of the cave and Marco Polo's observations about Zanzibar, the book is by turns mysterious, hilarious, beautiful and troubling.
In retracing Darwin's South American expeditions in the 1830s, Toby Green travelled an extraordinary 9000 miles from tropical northern Brazil and around the sub-continent to the Galapagos Islands, home to some of Darwin's greatest discoveries.