BOOKs by toby green (in reverse order of publication)
The Heretic of Cacheu: Struggles over Life in a 17th Century West African Port (Allen Lane/Chicago University Press, 2025)
This is a 'global microhistory' of Cacheu, a port in today's Guinea-Bissau -- and also a biography of the port's richest trader in the mid-17th century, Crispina Peres. Peres had mixed African-Portuguese ancestry, and was eventually denounced by her enemies and tried by the Inquisition for heresy. I wrote this book drawing on primary sources mainly produced by the Inquisition, and also building on over 30 years' knowledge of the region.
The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor - A Critique from the Left (C. Hurst & Co./Oxford University Press, 2023)
The Covid Consensus takes an internationalist perspective and argues that the response to Covid-19 reveals irreconcilable contradictions in Western thought, with devastating consequences for the Global Poor and the poor and disadvantaged in Western societies. New research reveals new evidence as to the impetus behind the WHO's advice on lockdowns, and argues that the policies represented radical continuities of existing trends of inequality, mediatisation and surveillance that threaten the future of liberal democracies.
I also wrote widely about responses to Covid for a range of publications, as well as doing media interviews for BBC World Service Newshour and Weekend, LBC, Breaking Points podcast with Ryan Grim and Emily Jashinsky, Sky News Australia, South Africa Broadcasting Corporation's night-time news, The Grayzone News's Max Blumenthal on Rofkin, Times Radio, TNT World and Voice of Islam.
A few reviews:
"As Toby Green and Thomas Fazi note in their book, The Covid Consensus, the idea of entire countries being placed in lockdown was something entirely new...As they note, an aggressive form of authoritarian capitalism resulted in poor people everywhere suffering enormous losses while rich people everywhere became immeasurably richer." Larry Elliott, The Guardian, February 13th 2023
"An outstanding history of the present, that no other historian or journalist has written to this day." - African Arguments, February 21st 2023
"I couldn't have imagined how damning the data would become, as a new book by Toby Green and Thomas Fazi, The Covid Consensus, now makes clear" -- The Australian, April 17th 2023
'A brave and measured work: essential reading', El Pais, August 16th 2021
'As [shown] in this book, the strategy judged to be the best for dealing with Covid-19 in the rest of the world is badly adapted and in fact counter-productive on the African continent" Le Monde, June 10th 2021
A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (Allen Lane/Chicago University Press, 2019)
Based on archival research in 9 countries, and fieldwork research in 8 West African countries, this book offers a new perspective on West Africa's relationship to world history through the lens of money and inequality.
A Fistful of Shells reconstructs the world of African kingdoms whose existence (like those of Europe) revolved around warfare, taxation, trade, diplomacy, complex religious beliefs, royal display and extravagance, and the production of art.
Over time, the relationship between Africa and Europe revolved ever more around the trade in slaves, damaging Africa's relative political and economic power. In spite of growing capital imbalances, longstanding contacts ensured remarkable connections between the Age of Revolution in Europe and America and the birth of a revolutionary the century in Africa.
A few reviews:
Book of the Year in History Today, Observer, Prospect, and The Wall Street Journal.
"Momentous...a work of staggering scholarship" Ben Okri, Daily Telegraph
"this is a stunning work of research and argumentation. It has the potential to become a landmark in our understanding of the most misunderstood of continents.” David Olusoga, New Statesman
"A very important book," Richard J. Evans, fivebooks.com
"A riveting new perspective on African history", Rana Mitter, BBC HIstory Magazine
Colombian Roulette: A Novel (Mkuki na Nyota Publishers/African Books Collective, 2016)
In an unnamed Latin American country, society eats itself from the inside. Pamela Oswald arrives and begins to work at a rehabilitation centre for poor kids who are self-harming. But when Oswald discovers that her host's previous guest disappeared in unexplained circumstances, she becomes uneasy...
Meanwhile, in a shantytown in distant Guadalajara, Elvis Jaramillo works alongside a mechanic calling himself the Angolan, a testament to his enslaved African ancestors. The Angolan shows Jaramillo how to make a life and survive. But then one of the Angolan’s friends makes an offer Jaramillo can’t refuse, and he leaves the only world he knows – a world where violence is the best opportunity going, and safety a luxury for those who can forget the past.
Imaginary Crimes: A Novel (Mkuki na Nyota Publishers/African Books Collective, 2013)
A novel whose protagonists include an Argentinian bookseller living in Madrid, a Gambian migrant to Europe, a Spanish waitress in London, and an American professor trying to prevent an appalling crime -- but struggling to get anyone to take it seriously when it does not yet exist.
Reviewed in The Morning Star :
"deeply satisfying...a powerful description of our current bewilderment at the opportunities and threats presented by the globalised trade in people, goods and ideologies" https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-13e1-Books-Imaginary-Crimes#.UujtGPtFDIU
The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300-1589 (Cambridge University Press, 2012)
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, the book challenges 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. The book suggests 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 discusses the consequences in Africa and beyond.
Inquisition: The Reign of Fear (Macmillan/St Martin's Press, 2007
Inquisition: The Reign of Fear is based on years of research in the archives of Portugal, Spain and the Vatican, alongside practical knowledge of the Iberian worlds of Europe, West Africa and Latin America.
Drawing comparisons from reviewers to Arthur Miller's The Crucible and Emmanuel Ladurie's Montaillou, the book received major reviews in most of the national press of the UK, and was the subject of major features and reviews in Brazil, Holland and Portugal.
A few reviews:
"A powerful study of intolerance" -- Guardian
“An exceptional study of the original terror states” –
Scotland on Sunday
“[a] masterful account of arguably the longest running reign of terror in human history" -- Independent on Sunday
“There is much in Toby Green’s engrossing parable of persecution that is unexpected…Green’s subject-matter may seem archaic, but his message is frighteningly modern” – Sunday Telegraph
Thomas More's Magician: A Novel Account of Utopia in Mexico (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004)
Thomas More's Magician is a one-off. It is on the one hand, a biography of a fascinating and little-known figure, Vasco de Quiroga, who arrived in Mexico in 1530, less than 10 years after Hernando Cortes's violent conquest of Tenochtitlan, and set up communes modelled on Thomas More's "Utopia". And on the other, the book is modelled on the structure of a utopian novel - my own homage to More - hence the book's subtitle: "A Novel Account of Utopia in Mexico".
Some reviews:
"The most richly idiosyncratic book of the year...a learned and quixotic account of an attempt to establish a 16th-century utopia in Mexico" –Independent
“A good and captivating story of great interest and resonance in the modern world” – Spectator
“A fascinating, moving story…[Green] beautifully describes the austere landscapes of Spain and Mexico’s water-dripping, flower-twined lushness, a paradise about to be destroyed” – Daily Telegraph
“[a] remarkable book…this is that rare publication, a serious work of history and philosophy which reads with all the compelling interest of a page-turning novel” – Morning Star
Meeting the Invisible Man: Secrets and Magic in West Africa (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001; republished by Faber Finds, 2009)
Meeting the Invisible Man tells the apparently eccentric story of my journey in 1999 and 2000 in Senegal, Guinea-Bissau and Guinea-Conakry in search of magic charms of invisibility and invulnerability. I went with my Senegalese friend El Hadji, who I am still in touch with 30 years later today.
As well as telling the story of this strange journey in search of powers of invisibility and invulnerability, Meeting the Invisible Man delves into the history of this region which was once the capital of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, a history which has profoundly affected its subsequent development.
This book shaped my subsequent career, as I soon embarked on a PhD in the history of this region.
Some reviews:
“Very beautifully, very sensitively written...[Green is] someone who knows Africa” - Ryszard Kapuscinski
"Thoughtful, evocative and endearingly odd, a fascinating meditation on belief and cultural difference" - Guardian
“impressive...an excellent book.” – Financial Times
“A fascinating, intimate, lively account of a magical struggle to know the unknowable.” – Irish Times
Saddled with Darwin: A Journey Through South America (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999; republished by Faber Finds, 2009)
This was my first book. Funded - bizarrely - by Heineken Beer, in September 1996 I set out to retrace Charles Darwin's
route in South America on horseback.
I left from Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, and travelled for a year. Saddled with Darwin tells the story of this journey in the last moment before the era of GPSs, mobile phones or the Internet - a marker for the speed of change since. The book also has a historical side, recounting how the continent which helped to shape Darwin's own theories has since itself changed, partly through the scientific revolution instigated by those ideas. The book was widely reviewed and went into multiple translations.
Some reviews:
“An epic journey and an astonishing tale.” - WG Sebald
“Darwin's writing, which bubbles through Green's humorous and poignant work, gives this book a depth rare in the travel genre. It could be a classic.” - Independent
“An excellent and thought-provoking book.” - Guardian
“Well researched, carefully observed, lyrically written, Saddled with Darwin has some wonderful moments which remind you of why people travel and write about it.” - Sunday Times