The Gift

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 present-day Angola. Slave traders carried this object from Cabinda to Abomey, the capital of the Kingdom of Dahomey in today's Republic of Benin, from where French officers looted the item in the late nineteenth-century. Drawing from 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.
Explains how French and African agents in West Africa and West Central Africa interacted in the era of the Atlantic slave trade
Reveals how gifts of prestige produced in Europe facilitated and complicated relations between Africans and Europeans
Helps readers to understand the role gifts of prestige played in the rise and fall of the Atlantic slave trade in West Africa and West Central Africa