Toby Green


Toby Green is a British historian who is a Senior Lecturer in Lusophone African History and Culture at King's College London. He obtained his Doctor of Philosophy in African studies at the University of Birmingham. He is Chair of the Fontes Historiae Africanae Committee of the British Academy, and has written extensively about African early modern history and colonial African slavery, mainly focussed on slavery in the Portuguese colonies.
He has also written on the Spanish Inquisition. Green disagrees with the notion of a Black Legend of the Spanish Inquisition and often quotes sixteenth-century sources regarding the institution's abuse of power in Latin America, and is often cited regarding this subject. He has other publications regarding the issues of religious prosecution and oppression in Africa and other European colonies.
His interests are slavery in the Atlantic and cultural and economic links between America and Africa.
His book A Fistful of Shells won the 2019 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding and was shortlisted for the 2020 Wolfson History Prize.

Views on the Spanish Inquisition

Green addresses the Spanish Inquisition mainly through Hispano-American sources. He notes that the great unchecked power given to inquisitors meant that they were "widely seen as above the law" and sometimes had motives for imprisoning and sometimes executing alleged offenders other than for the purpose of punishing religious nonconformity, mainly in Hispanoamerica and Iberoamerica.

Publications

Articles

Green, T. 28 Sep 2017 In : Journal of Global Slavery. 2, p. 310-336