Book cover of Making Money: Life, Death, and Early Modern Trade on Africa's Guinea Coast

Book description

A new era in world history began when Atlantic maritime trade among Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas opened up in the fifteenth century, setting the stage for massive economic and cultural change. In Making Money, Colleen Kriger examines the influence of the global trade on the Upper Guinea Coast…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Making Money as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

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…

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