Appendix The ‘crisis of adaptation’: a bibliography

Summary

This is not a bibliography of works cited in the contributions to this volume, but a guide to the literature on the commercial transition in nineteenth-century western Africa, including especially the debate on the concept of a ‘crisis of adaptation’. It is confined to works which deal wholly or substantially with the history and implications of the transition, rather than those which mention it only casually or briefly, to works which bear upon the African as opposed to the European side of the Atlantic trade (though this distinction is difficult to make in practice), and chronologically, to those which deal with the pre-colonial rather than the colonial period (though, again, this distinction is not always clear-cut); but within these limitations, it is (in intention, though doubtless not in execution) comprehensive.