The Gift
How Objects of Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism
- ISBN: 9781108839297
- Editorial: Cambridge University Press
- Fecha de la edición: 2024
- Lugar de la edición: Cambridge . Reino Unido
- Colección: Cambridge Studies on the African Diaspora
- Encuadernación: Cartoné
- Medidas: 24 cm
- Nº Pág.: 307
- Idiomas: Inglés
The Gift explores how objects of prestige contributed to cross-cultural exchanges between Africans and Europeans during the Atlantic slave trade. An eighteenth-century silver ceremonial sword, commissioned in the port of La Rochelle by French traders, was offered as a gift to an African commercial agent in the port of Cabinda (Kingdom of Ngoyo), in twenty-first century Angola. Slave traders carried this object from Cabinda to Abomey, the capital of the Kingdom of Dahomey in twenty-first century's Republic of Benin, from where French officers looted the item in the late nineteenth century. Drawing on a rich set of sources in French, English, and Portuguese, as well as artifacts housed in museums across Europe and the Americas, Ana Lucia Araujo illuminates how luxury objects impacted European-African relations, and how these economic, cultural, and social interactions paved the way for the European conquest and colonization of West Africa and West Central Africa.
