‘Good Lawyers but Poor Workers’: Recruited Angolan Labour in the Copper Mines of Katanga, 1917–1921

1977 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Perrings

Between 1917 and 1921 Robert Williams and Company recruited labour from the Moxico Province of Angola for work in the Katanga copper mines of the Union Minière. The episode is one of the better documented in a period in which comparable recruiting operations were the mainstay of the industry, and provides a case study that is also a vehicle for the analysis of the significance of recruitment both as an instrument of industrial strategy and a determinant of worker behaviour. It is argued that recruitment is characteristic of a phase in the development of the colonial political economy marked by the use of highly unskilled labour intensive techniques of production in the dominant industry. It is a mechanism designed specifically to service such techniques through the regulation of the induced supply of short-term, unskilled labour. It is further argued that it is such regulation—realized as coercion—that gives recruitment its particularity as a determinant of worker behaviour, and this paper seeks to identify from the Angolan case the precise implications which this had for the workers themselves.

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard B. Apgar

As destination of choice for many short-term study abroad programs, Berlin offers students of German language, culture and history a number of sites richly layered with significance. The complexities of these sites and the competing narratives that surround them are difficult for students to grasp in a condensed period of time. Using approaches from the spatial humanities, this article offers a case study for enhancing student learning through the creation of digital maps and itineraries in a campus-based course for subsequent use during a three-week program in Berlin. In particular, the concept of deep mapping is discussed as a means of augmenting understanding of the city and its history from a narrative across time to a narrative across the physical space of the city. As itineraries, these course-based projects were replicated on site. In moving from the digital environment to the urban landscape, this article concludes by noting meanings uncovered and narratives formed as we moved through the physical space of the city.


2005 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Kidd

Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre) made several iconoclastic interventions in the field of Scottish history. These earned him a notoriety in Scottish circles which, while not undeserved, has led to the reductive dismissal of Trevor-Roper's ideas, particularly his controversial interpretation of the Scottish Enlightenment, as the product of Scotophobia. In their indignation Scottish historians have missed the wider issues which prompted Trevor-Roper's investigation of the Scottish Enlightenment as a fascinating case study in European cultural history. Notably, Trevor-Roper used the example of Scotland to challenge Weberian-inspired notions of Puritan progressivism, arguing instead that the Arminian culture of north-east Scotland had played a disproportionate role in the rise of the Scottish Enlightenment. Indeed, working on the assumption that the essence of Enlightenment was its assault on clerical bigotry, Trevor-Roper sought the roots of the Scottish Enlightenment in Jacobitism, the counter-cultural alternative to post-1690 Scotland's Calvinist Kirk establishment. Though easily misconstrued as a dogmatic conservative, Trevor-Roper flirted with Marxisant sociology, not least in his account of the social underpinnings of the Scottish Enlightenment. Trevor-Roper argued that it was the rapidity of eighteenth-century Scotland's social and economic transformation which had produced in one generation a remarkable body of political economy conceptualising social change, and in the next a romantic movement whose powers of nostalgic enchantment were felt across the breadth of Europe.


2017 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-63
Author(s):  
Benjamin Pickford

Benjamin Pickford, “Context Mediated: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Political Economy of Plagiarism” (pp. 35–63) Context has long been a critical determiner of methodologies for literary studies, granting scholars the tools to make objective claims about a text’s political or economic relation to the situation of its genesis. This essay argues that Ralph Waldo Emerson anticipatively criticizes our commitment to such practices through his use of plagiarism—a literary mode that exemplifies the denial of the sovereignty of context. I focus on two core principles that underlie Emerson’s conception of literature’s civic role in Essays: Second Series (1844): first, that literature is driven by an impulse to decontextualize; second, that this means that it has a deep affinity with the deterritorializing logic of capital. Provocatively proposing Emerson as a theorist of the relation between literature and economics, I argue that Essays: Second Series shows how the literary text can negotiate its ineluctable culpability with capitalism, but this does not mean that it can presume to possess a privileged point of vantage that might deny such culpability. Given that this is precisely what much historicizing or contextualizing scholarship implies, I contend that Emerson gives us a case study in the limits of literature and criticism’s economic agency.


Erdkunde ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 191-204
Author(s):  
Marcus Hübscher ◽  
Juana Schulze ◽  
Felix zur Lage ◽  
Johannes Ringel

Short-term rentals such as Airbnb have become a persistent element of today’s urbanism around the globe. The impacts are manifold and differ depending on the context. In cities with a traditionally smaller accommodation market, the impacts might be particularly strong, as Airbnb contributes to ongoing touristification processes. Despite that, small and medium-sized cities have not been in the centre of research so far. This paper focuses on Santa Cruz de Tenerife as a medium-sized Spanish city. Although embedded in the touristic region of the Canary Islands, Santa Cruz is not a tourist city per se but still relies on touristification strategies. This paper aims to expand the knowledge of Airbnb’s spatial patterns in this type of city. The use of data collected from web scraping and geographic information systems (GIS) demonstrates that Airbnb has opened up new tourism markets outside of the centrally established tourist accommodations. It also shows that the price gap between Airbnb and the housing rental market is broadest in neighbourhoods that had not experienced tourism before Airbnb entered the market. In the centre the highest prices and the smallest units are identified, but two peripheral quarters stand out. Anaga Mountains, a natural and rural space, has the highest numbers of Airbnb listings per capita. Suroeste, a suburban quarter, shows the highest growth rates on the rental market, which implies a linkage between Airbnb and suburbanization processes.


Author(s):  
Donald Houston ◽  
Georgiana Varna ◽  
Iain Docherty

Abstract The concept of ‘inclusive growth’ (IG) is discussed in a political economy framework. The article reports comparative analysis of economic and planning policy documents from Scotland, England and the UK and findings from expert workshops held in Scotland, which identify four key policy areas for ‘inclusive growth’: skills, transport and housing for young people; city-regional governance; childcare; and place-making. These policies share with the ‘Foundational Economy’ an emphasis on everyday infrastructure and services, but add an emphasis on inter-generational justice and stress the importance of community empowerment as much as re-municipalisation. Factors enabling IG policy development include: the necessary political powers; a unifying political discourse and civic institutions; and inclusive governance and participatory democracy.


Author(s):  
Daniel L. Villeneuve ◽  
Brett R. Blackwell ◽  
Jenna E. Cavallin ◽  
Wan‐Yun Cheng ◽  
David J. Feifarek ◽  
...  

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