Work in Times of Slavery, Colonialism, and Civil War: Labor Relations in Angola from 1800 to 2000

2014 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
pp. 363-385 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jelmer Vos

AbstractIn Angola, a trend towards labor commodification, set in motion under the impact of the nineteenth-century produce trade and colonial rule, has been reversed in the decades since independence. Angolans have always worked mainly in the reciprocal sphere, but with the growing commercialization of the economy after the abolition of the slave trade, self-employment has also become a constant in Angolan labor history. By 2000, the rural population was thrown back to subsistence farming, while the larger part of the urban population has tried to survive by self-employment in the informal economy. Wage labor, widespread under colonialism, has become less common.

2017 ◽  
Vol 62 (S25) ◽  
pp. 45-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henrique Espada Lima ◽  
Fabiane Popinigis

AbstractThis article focuses on the lives of workers in small commerce and in domestic service in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro. It seeks to understand both what united and what differentiated maids (criadas) and clerks (caixeiros), two types of laborers whose lives and work had much in common, and two categories of labor that, although ubiquitous, are frequently overlooked in Brazilian labor history. We consider how, together, class, gender, and race shaped the divergent trajectories ofcriadasandcaixeirosover the course of the nineteenth century, and what the legal disputes in which they were involved during that period can teach us about the shifting dynamics in labor relations in a society marked by both slavery and labor dependency more broadly. As sources for this analysis, we draw on documents produced by legal proceedings from the 1830s through the 1880s, in which men and women involved in petty commerce and domestic service presented their cases before the courts to claim their unpaid wages.


2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (162) ◽  
pp. 336-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Mac Cuarta

AbstractDown to the mid-nineteenth century, the rural population in Ireland was obliged by law to contribute to the upkeep of the Church of Ireland clergy by means of tithes, a measure denoting a proportion of annual agricultural produce. The document illustrates what was happening in the late sixteenth century, as separate ecclesial structures were emerging, and Catholics were beginning to determine how to support their own clergy. Control of ecclesiastical resources was a major issue for the Catholic community in the century after the introduction of the Reformation. However, for want of documentation the use of tithes to support Catholic priests, much less the impact of this issue on relationships within that community, between ecclesiastics and propertied laity, has been little noted. This text – a dispensation to hold parish revenues, signed by a papally-appointed bishop ministering in the south-east – illustrates how the recusant community in an anglicised part of Ireland addressed some issues posed by Catholic ownership of tithes in the 1590s. It exemplifies the confusion, competing claims, and anxiety of conscience among some who benefited from the secularisation of the church’s medieval patrimony; it also preserves the official response of the relevant Catholic ecclesiastical authority to an individual situation.


Africa ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Gocking

This article compares and contrasts the development of the legal systems of two British colonies that occuped almost opposite ends of the colonial judicial continuum: what in colonial times were known as the Gold Coast and Basutoland. Both became British colonies in the late nineteenth century, but followed considerably different paths to that status. In the case of the Gold Coast it followed centuries of contact between Europeans and the coastal peoples in this area of West Africa. In the case of Basutoland incorporation into the European world was a nineteenth-century phenomenon and far more rapid. Nevertheless, at the turn of the century, as indirect rule became the officially accepted wisdom as to how colonial peoples should be ruled, administrators in both colonies sought to make the chiefly order an integral part of the colony's administration and award its chiefs judicial responsibilities. In the Gold Coast, however, chiefly courts remained in competition with a highly developed British-style Supreme Court. In Basutoland there were basically only chiefly courts until late in the colonial period, which applied Sesotho customary law that was written down as the Laws of Lerotholi in 1903. The two-tier judicial system of the Gold Coast allowed far more contestation and was far more flexible and responsive to social changes than was the case in Basutoland. Incremental changes over time meant that the judicial system evolved far more smoothly than in Basutoland. When in the latter colony changes did not come ‘from above’ in the 1940s, there was a serious outbreak of ‘medicine murders’ that many observers felt was directly related to the chiefs losing their judicial role. Also, the colony's high court ruled against the validity of the Laws of Lerotholi in the controversial ‘Regency case’. Apart from being a return to comparative analyses of the impact of colonial rule on former African colonies, much in vogue in the 1960s, this study is an attempt to modify the emphasis on ‘cleavage’ and the ‘coercive’ that has characterised historians' approach to the study of colonial law.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wenbin Liu ◽  
Fubao Sun ◽  
Wee Ho Lim ◽  
Jie Zhang ◽  
Hong Wang ◽  
...  

Abstract. In Paris Agreement of 2015, a more ambitious climate change mitigation target, on limiting the global warming at 1.5 °C instead of 2 °C above pre-industrial levels, has been proposed. Scientific investigations are necessary to investigate environmental risks associated with these warming targets. This study is the first risk-based assessment of changes in global meteorological drought and the impact of severe drought on population at 1.5 °C and 2 °C additional warming conditions using the CMIP5 (the fifth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project) climate models. Our results highlight the risk of meteorological drought at the globe and in several hotspot regions such as Amazon, Northeastern Brazil, South Africa and Central Europe at both 1.5 °C and 2 °C global warming relative to the historical period. Correspondingly, more people would be exposed to severe droughts in many regions (i.e., total and urban population in East Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Europe and rural population in Central Asia, South Africa and South Asia). By keeping the warming at 1.5 °C above the pre-industrial levels instead of 2 °C, the risks of meteorological drought would decrease (i.e., less drought duration, drought intensity and drought severity but relatively more frequent severe drought) and the affected total and urban population would decrease (the exposed rural population would increase in most regions) at global and sub-continental scales. Whilst challenging for the rural areas, the benefits of limiting warming to below 1.5 °C are significant for reducing the risks and societal impacts of global meteorological drought.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-101
Author(s):  
S.N. Singh

The informal economy plays a key role in ensuring economic growth and social well-being in developing countries. In particular, in Africa, more than 60% of the urban population, as well as almost 80% of the nonagricultural population, are employed in the informal economy. The main purpose of the study is to study the role of street commerce in supporting urban life. The object of study is one of Ethiopia’s remote cities, Matt. The extent of the impact of street commerce on the incomes of the urban population, including those who do not own land, is analyzed in the study. The study is aimed at finding patterns between the living conditions of urban population living on the brink of poverty and the dynamics of street commerce, the proceeds of which are directed to meet their daily physiological needs. The scientific approaches to the study of the relationship between the volume of street commerce and living conditions of the urban population have been systematized. The source of the primary data for the survey is questionnaires that contained information on the sociodemographic profile of street traders, the extent of their activity, the amount of start-up capital, access to credit, and their main difficulties in this type of activity. Descriptive statistics methods became a methodological tool of the conducted research. The results of the empirical analysis have shown that there is a positive correlation between street commerce and the well-being of urban populations. In addition, it is found that about 37.9% of people involved in street trading are experiencing problems as a result of tightening regulatory regulations by the state. The study empirically confirms and theoretically proves that street selling is one of the important sources of urban existence in Ethiopia. The results of the study can be useful for government officials, NGOs, international institutions, as well as researchers dealing with this issue. Keywords: street trade, livelihoods, urban poverty, alternative employment opportunities.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simone Schotte ◽  
Michael Danquah ◽  
Robert Darko Osei ◽  
Kunal Sen

In this paper, we provide causal evidence of the impact of stringent lockdown policies on labour market outcomes at both the extensive and intensive margins, using Ghana as a case study. We take advantage of a specific policy setting, in which strict stay-at-home orders were issued and enforced in two spatially delimited areas, bringing Ghana’s major metropolitan centres to a standstill, while in the rest of the country less stringent regulations were in place. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that the three-week lockdown had a large and significant immediate negative impact on employment in the treated districts, particularly among workers in informal self-employment. While the gap in employment between the treated and control districts had narrowed four months after the lockdown was lifted, we detect a persistent nationwide impact on labour market outcomes, jeopardizing particularly the livelihoods of small business owners mainly operating in the informal economy.


2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (S27) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pepijn Brandon ◽  
Niklas Frykman ◽  
Pernille Røge

AbstractColonial and postcolonial port cities in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean regions functioned as crucial hubs in the commodity flows that accompanied the emergence and expansion of global capitalism. They did so by bringing together laboring populations of many different backgrounds and statuses – legally free or semi-free wage laborers, soldiers, sailors, and the self-employed, indentured servants, convicts, and slaves. Focusing on the period from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, a crucial moment in the establishment of the world market, the transformation of colonial states, and the reorganization of labor and labor migration on a transoceanic scale, the contributions in this special issue address the consequences of the presence of these “motley crews” on and around the docks and the neighborhoods that stretched behind them. The introduction places the articles within the context of the development of the field of Global Labor History more generally. It argues that the dense daily interaction that took place in port cities makes them an ideal vantage point from which to investigate the consequences of the “simultaneity” of different labor relations for questions such as the organization of the work process under developing capitalism, the emergence of new forms of social control, the impact of forced and free migration on class formation, and the role of social diversity in shaping different forms of group and class solidarity. The introduction also discusses the significance of the articles presented in this special issue for three prevailing but problematic dichotomies in labor historiography: the sharp borders drawn between so-called free and unfree labor, between the Atlantic and the Indian oceans, and the pre-modern and modern eras.


2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (5) ◽  
pp. 1184-1206 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberto Dell'Anno

This paper develops a microfounded macroeconomic modeling framework to investigate the relationship between informality and the income distribution. We show that multiple equilibria may rise if credit markets are imperfect and that there is a nondivisible entry cost in the formal economy. The theoretical analysis demonstrates that in the steady state, low levels of inequality are negatively correlated with high informality; conversely, high inequality exacerbates informality. This finding supports the hypothesis of an optimal level of inequality that minimizes the informal economy relative to the impact of other levels of inequality. However, for ordinary income distributions, changes in the level of inequality have only a slight effect on the informality rate. We calibrate the model using data on the U.S. and Mexican economies to estimate the level of inequality that minimizes the informality rate. The self-employment rate emerges as the most relevant determinant of the informality rate.


Author(s):  
Mahmud Akhter Shareef ◽  
Yogesh K. Dwivedi ◽  
Michael D. Williams ◽  
Nitish Singh

Information and communication technology (ICT) is the prime driving force of Internet economy. Therefore, before implementing E-Commerce (EC) and E-Government (EG) projects, it is a vital issue to investigate the capability of developing countries to adopt ICT and reveal the impact of adopting ICT among society. However, it is observed that in developing countries, rural and urban population have significant digital divide. We argue that the purposes of implementing Internet-based projects, particularly EG, can only be accomplished and full benefits can be realized if rural population of developing countries has that ability to adopt ICT, the main driver of EG, and if ICT has positive impact on rural population in technological, economical, and social perspectives. Therefore, it is the prime motive of policy makers of developing countries to study the impact of ICT in capability development among citizens prior to launching EG. To study the impact of ICT on both rural and urban population separately through a vertical survey, this research proposes separate ad-hoc and post-hoc frameworks.


Author(s):  
Shane Doyle

This chapter discusses the literature relating to demography and disease in Africa. It evaluates the impact on patterns of morbidity and mortality of Africa’s accelerating integration into globalized trading networks in the nineteenth century, and subsequently of its conquest by European empires. The debate about the role played by colonial rule in stimulating Africa’s shift from historic underpopulation towards extremely rapid growth forms the heart of the chapter. The later sections consider competing theories which seek to explain the distinctiveness of fertility decline within Africa and the literature which has tried to evaluate and explain the demographic impact of Africa’s HIV pandemic.


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