Dr Toby Green
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
Tel +44 (0)20 7848 1741
Email tobias.green@kcl.ac.uk
Address Department of History and Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies
King’s College London
Room S 3.08
Strand
London WC2R 2LS
Biography
After reading Philosophy at Cambridge (1996), Toby Green worked as a writer and editor, publishing various books that have been translated into 10 languages. He then began a doctorate at the Centre of West African Studies at Birmingham University in 2002. Working with the renowned specialist on Timbuktu and Songhay Paulo de Moraes Farias, he completed his PhD on the New Christians in Cape Verde in 2007, and then began a 3-year British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Birmingham. He came to King's as a Leverhulme Fellow in 2010, and in 2013 begins a lectureship in Lusophone African History and Culture. He has given seminars and contributed to symposia at various institutions in Brazil, France, Portugal, the UK and the USA.
Research interests
Wide range of interests broadly structured around African engagement with the early Atlantic world and mercantilism. Specific areas of interest include:
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West Africa and the Atlantic World (16th-17th Centuries)
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Trans-Saharan and Trans-Atlantic Diasporas
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Atlantic Slavery
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Creolization
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New Christians in Europe, the Americas and West Africa
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Iberian Empires and Institutions in their Global Setting
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African economic history and its intersection with world economic history
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Comparative history of labour in Africa and the Americas
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Free and enslaved Africans in the New World
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Cultural and economic links between Brazil and Africa, 16th-19th centuries
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The history of race in the Atlantic world
After a PhD on New Christians in the Cape Verde region of Western Africa (2007; Birmingham University), interests have expanded to include wider areas of West African engagement with the Atlantic. His monograph on the early trans-Atlantic slave trade was published by Cambridge University Press in 2012, as well as an edited volume on the precolonial history of Western Africa published by Oxford University Press for the British Academy, also in 2012. His current research project sponsored by Leverhulme is a comparative study of the regions of Western Africa and Angola in the 17th century and their engagement with Atlantic empires in the era of the consolidation of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. He is also engaged in collaborative research projects with scholars in Brazil and The Gambia.
Selected publications
Toby Green (2012) (ed.) Brokers of Change: Atlantic Commerce and Cultures in Pre-Colonial Western Africa Oxford University Press for the British Academy [Edited Book in Print]
Toby Green (2012) 'Policing the Empires: a Comparative Perspective on the Institutional Trajectory of the Inquisition in the Portuguese and Spanish Overseas Territories (Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries)' HISPANIC RESEARCH JOURNAL, 13 (1), pp. 7-25. [Article in print Journal]
Toby Green (2011) 'Beyond the Culture Wars: Reconnecting African and Jewish Diasporas in the Past and the Present', in African Athena: New Agendas pp. 139-155 [Chapter]
Toby Green (2011) 'Building Slavery in the Atlantic World: Atlantic Connections and the Changing Institution of Slavery in Cabo Verde, Fifteenth-Sixteenth Centuries' Slavery and abolition, 32 (2), pp. 227-245. [Article in print Journal]
Tobias Green (2011) The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589 Cambridge University Press [Authored Book in print]
Toby Green (2009) 'Architects of Knowledge, Builders of Power: Constructing the Kaabu 'Empire', 16th-17th centuries' Mande Studies, pp. 91-112. [Article in print Journal]
Toby Green (2009) 'Building Creole Identity in the African Atlantic: Boundaries of Race and Religion in 17th Century Cabo Verde' History in Africa, 36, pp. 103-125. [Article in print Journal]
Toby Green (2009) 'The Evolution of Creole Identity in Cape Verde', in The Creolization Reader pp. 157-166 [Chapter]
Toby Green (2007) '‘E se mais mundo houvera, lá chegara’. La Région du Cap Vert, Première Tentative de Colonisation Portugaise Ouest-africaine à l’Aube de la Grande Traite Atlantique (XVe-XIXe Siècles) ', in Colonisations et héritages actuels au Sahara et au Sahel pp. Vol. 1, 363-Vol. 1, 390 [Chapter]
Teaching
Undergraduate
Postgraduate
PhD supervision
Dr Toby Green welcomes approaches from potential doctoral students in areas matching his areas of interest.
Current/Recent Supervisions Include:
PhD:
Michelle Liebst (Missions and Abolition in late 19th century Zanzibar)
MA:
Will Pugliese (Language and Formation of National Identity in the Belgian Congo, 1885-1960)
Julie Svalastog (The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database: Quantitative Problems and Qualitatative Possibilities)
Robert Ubsdell (Amilcar Cabral’s Reafricanization in Post-Colonial Cabo Verde: The Experience of Female Migrants to Italy)
Expertise and public engagement
Dr Toby Green is the Director of Institutional Relations of the Amilcar Cabral Institute of Economic and Political Research, a think-tank specializing in Guinea-Bissau which is affiliated to the new UK All-Party Parliamentary Group on Guinea-Bissau (www.cabralinstitute.org). He has written widely for the national press, and is a reviewer for The Independent.He is also a member of the Council of the African Studies Association of the UK, and on the advisory board of research projects in Brazil and The Netherlands.