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SUMMARY:‘A Global Moment: The Circulation of East African Cowries across
  Land and Oceans (18th-19th Century)’ - Karin Pallaver (University of Bo
 logna) 
DTSTART:20230307T171500Z
DTEND:20230307T184500Z
UID:TALK194215@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Gareth Austin
DESCRIPTION:In 1845\, the Hamburg-based firm\, A.J. Hertz\, purchased a sm
 all load of cowrie shells (M. annulus) in Zanzibar\, shipped it to West Af
 rica and sold it at Whydah\, in the Kingdom of Dahomey. It is well-known t
 hat this apparently trivial operation had enormous consequences on the eco
 nomies and currency systems of West Africa. In a few decades\, 16 billion 
 shells were introduced into the region causing inflation that gradually re
 ndered cowrie shells ‘useless as currency’ (Hogendorn and Johnson . Th
 e so-called ‘great cowrie inflation’ has become an iconic moment in th
 e historiography of West Africa. The conditions and contingencies under wh
 ich West African traders ‘decided’ (Cooper 2001\, 205) to accept East 
 African shells and the resulting shifts in the production\, circulation an
 d consumption of cowries beyond West Africa have remained largely unexplor
 ed\, however. This paper begins from this gaping hole in the literature an
 d proposes to consider the import of East African cowries in West Africa a
 s a ‘global moment’ (Conrad 2016\, 155-6). The exploration of the sync
 hronic and diachronic context of this ‘global moment’ can be an eye-op
 ener revealing the connections among events and processes which were happe
 ning simultaneously in different locations\, but whose interconnectedness 
 is obscured by limiting the analysis to only one region. Through a multi-s
 ited space of analysis – formed by Zanzibar\, the Buganda kingdom\, the 
 palm oil-producing area in West Africa\, the Maldives\, and the slave plan
 tations in Virginia – this paper follows East African cowries across lan
 d and oceans to show how the choices\, initiatives and actions of African 
 consumers and producers drove global processes of production\, trade and e
 xchange.
LOCATION:King's College (the Audit Room)
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