Many of our UoP history students take the opportunity to do voluntary work in one of the many museums in Portsmouth or nearby. Second-year UoP History Isobel Turtle started volunteering even earlier. Having decided to defer her university entry, she started working at the Isle of Wight shipwreck centre in 2021. It’s given her lots of unique opportunities to learn how a museum works: highlights have included seeing how a museum becomes accredited by the Arts Council, how grants and funding are secured and used, how exhibitions are created from scratch, working on databasing the collection, helping with visiting school groups and managing volunteers. She has worked her way up to being the Museum Supervisor, ready for when the museum moves to larger premises over the next year or two!
For the second year module, The Hidden Lives of Things, taught by Dr Katy Gibbons and Dr Mary Cannon, for their assessment, students have to produce an ‘object biography’ for a historical artefact. Isobel was really glad to be able to use the museum and her access to it to write an object biography of one of the most poignant artefacts in the collection: manillas, a form of commodity money in the form of bracelet used across West Africa and associated with the slave trade, which washed up in a shipwreck off the Island.
Peter DeWint (1784 – 1849), Shipwreck off the Needles, Isle of Wight, watercolour, Yale Centre for British Art
‘Manillas’ were a form of commodity money used across West Africa and are today most known for their associations with the transatlantic slave trade, however before becoming synonymous with it as well as after, manillas took on many different roles in a variety of contexts. The etymology of the word manilla suggests the term was picked up via interactions with the Portuguese and refers to their distinctive bracelet-like horseshoe shape.[1] Manillas are found in multiple variations of materials such as brass, bronze, copper as well as in different sizes, weights, and levels of embellishment based on their region of origin as well as their intended value and usage.[2] Accounts note the functionality of the shape of manillas, describing how indigenous West Africans would wear and carry them on their arms on their way to make smaller, everyday purchases but would otherwise be put into parcels if the size, weight or quantity of manillas called for it.[3] These 3 manillas appear to be of the ‘popo’ subtype due to their small size, smoothed, tapered ends and lack of decorative elements. This type was in use from the 17th to the early 20th century and was most commonly connected to French, English and Dutch traders.[4] Found in Chale Bay off the Southwest coast of the Isle of Wight, these manillas are held in Island’s Shipwreck Centre & Maritime Museum. The exact circumstances of how these particular manillas came to be in Chale Bay awaits further examination, but the 3-mile-long stretch of coastline itself is known for its vast array of shipwrecks. Initial but as yet unconfirmed opinions on the age of the wreck, clues such as the discovery of ivory tusks nearby as well as comparable ‘popo’ style manillas found on a confirmed 17th century Royal African Company shipwreck also in the English Channel suggest that the wreckage in which these manillas were found had links to West Africa during the era of the Transatlantic slave trade. [5]
Manillas Manillas found off the Isle of Wight Coast, Martin Woodward Collection, Shipwreck Centre & Maritime Museum, photograph taken by Isobel.
In their extended history, the term ‘manilla’ encompassed a broad range of bracelet-shaped metal rings which were used across West Africa for adornment in addition to functioning as money for a multitude of trade purposes. Despite this, historian Eugenia W. Herbert argues that African metal rings often do not conform to the ‘Western definition of fine art’, leading to a near total disregard for this use from Europeans. [6] Although their ubiquitousness in West Africa suggests manillas had probably been used for a very long time there, the European use of manillas as a commodity existed predominantly in relation to slave trading by the 18th century, making it all the more likely that these specific manillas ended up in shipwreck in Europe as a result of it. [7]
Illustration from Burgkmair, Natives of Guinea and Algoa, 1508 showing Africans wearing manillas.
From the 16th century onwards manillas became the principal currency of the slave trade with the prices of slaves expressed in terms of different types of manillas. By its peak, factories in Birmingham and Bristol were mass producing manillas for use exclusively in the slave trade, resulting in an erasure and overshadowing of the long and complex history in African custom. [8] This mass production further shows how interlinked wealth-building and the development of industrialisation in England was with the slave trade, and by extension its dependency on the economic crippling and cultural pilfering of West Africa. [9] While the use of manillas outlived the transatlantic slave trade, they continued to be used by Europeans mainly in colonial contexts throughout the 19th century, most notably in relation to the palm oil trade.[10] While their circulation was prohibited in the early 20th century, the use of manillas among indigenous populations, particularly in Nigeria or the so called ‘manilla belt’ where the palm oil trade was focused, continued in line with tradition and existed concurrently with the currencies of colonial powers.[11] This practice largely came to an abrupt and forced end 1949 when the Manilla Prohibition Ordnance was launched under British rule in the ‘manilla belt’, taking them out of circulation and making possession of a certain amount of manillas a punishable offence.[12] Over 32 million individual manillas weighing 2,464 tons were recalled and sold for scrap, with historian Eugenia W. Herbert noting the difficulty in knowing ‘what became of it all.’ [13] This process is argued to have been the final step toward full colonial control over the economy in this part of West Africa.[14]
A 16th century Benin Bronze depicting a Portuguese soldier with manillas in the background.
Manillas have long posed a methodological challenge to historians due to their visual and material variability as well as the difficulty in properly defining what fits into the category.[15] Due to this, careful consideration must be given to their individual materiality as well as the spatial context in which they are found in order to uncover their origins and stories. Additional help to pinpoint this is supplied through interdisciplinary research combining historical research with techniques like geochemical analysis, a practice which has resulted in definitive proof that the Benin bronzes are made of metals yielded from the melting down of manillas.[16] Considering the history of manillas, the historiography surrounding the subject of one of, if not the most, contentious issues concerning the present-day legacy of colonial violence and cultural theft is therefore made even more poignant.[17]
Furthermore, this analysis provides evidence of the melting down and reuse of manillas even prior to the majority of existing examples being sold for scrap, showing how the material through which people were bought and sold, and therefore one of the most harrowing legacies of human cruelty in history, lives on in culturally significant artworks as well as in an untold number of seemingly innocuous and everyday objects. These manillas however, continue to exist in their namesake form and are both an example of the violent legacy of the colonial process and a preservation of a West African tradition which was stamped out through it.
[1] Paul Einzig, Primitive Money: In Its Ethnological, Historical and Economic Aspects (Elsevier, 2014).
[2] Eugenia W. Herbert, Red Gold of Africa: Copper in Precolonial History and Culture (University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 202.
[3] Herbert, Red Gold of Africa, 203.
[4] Tobias B. Skowronek et al., “German Brass for Benin Bronzes: Geochemical Analysis Insights into the Early Atlantic Trade,” Plos One, 18, no. 4 (April 5, 2023).
[5] Skowronek et al.
[6] Herbert, Red Gold of Africa, 203, 210.
[7] Beat Kümin, The European World 1500-1800: An Introduction to Early Modern History (Milton: Taylor & Francis Group, 2017), 64.
[8] “A brass manilla from West Africa,” accessed March 14, 2024, https://www.ashmolean.org/article/brass-manilla-west-africa.
[9] Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 98.
[10] Herbert, Red Gold of Africa, 203.
[11] Rolf Denk, The West African Manilla Currency: Research and Securing of Evidence from 1439-2019 (Tredition, 2021). Ben Naanen, “Economy within an Economy: The Manilla Currency, Exchange Rate Instability and Social Conditions in South-Eastern Nigeria, 1900-48,” The Journal of African History 34, no. 3 (1993): 446.
[12] Naanen, “Economy within an Economy,” 445.
[13] Naanen, “Economy within an Economy,” 445. Herbert, Red Gold of Africa, 182.
[14] Naanen, “Economy within an Economy,” 445.
[15] Denk, The West African Manilla Currency.
[16] Skowronek et al., “German Brass for Benin Bronzes.”
[17] Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution (London: Pluto Press, 2020), 219.
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