Work and Discipline on the East African Coast
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Abstract:Frederick Cooper’s first three books, published between 1977 and 1987, were written during African historians’ first sustained critical engagement with African archives and African voices. Cooper’s books were literally in the weeds with slave and free labor in East Africa, yet their importance went beyond the region. Read in sequence, we see how Cooper’s work was shifting toward studies of the metropole by the mid-1980s. Taken together we see how practices in the workplace shaped policies in Whitehall, that conditions on plantations and on docks caused a rethinking of how colonialists might most successfully exert control.