Trade, State, and Society Among the Yao in the Nineteenth Century

1969 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 405-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward A. Alpers

Through their deep involvement in the long-distance trade of eastern central Africa, the Yao were increasingly exposed to the impact of Swahili traders and their culture. During the nineteenth century the increased volume of trade, and the ever growing importance of slaves in that trade, combined to produce a marked growth in the scale of Yao political units. This paper begins by outlining the growth of Yao trade before the nineteenth century. It then considers the nature of Yao political organization and the way in which the slave trade, in particular, facilitated the rise of large territorial chiefdoms. The last section deals with related social and cultural changes, including the growth of towns and the introduction of Islam.

1972 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Northrup

The peoples of south-eastern Nigeria have been involved in trade for as long as there are any records. The archaeological sites at Igbo-Ukwu and other evidence reveal long distance trade in metal and beads, as well as regional trade in salt, cloth, and beads at an early date. The lower Niger River and its Delta featured prominently in this early trade, and evidence is offered to suggest a continuity in the basic modes of trade on the lower Niger from c. A.D. 1500 to the mid-nineteenth century. An attempt to sketch the basic economic institutions of the Igbo hinterland before the height of the slave trade stresses regional trading networks in salt, cloth, and metal, the use of currencies, and a nexus of religious and economic institutions and persons. It is argued that while the growth of the slave trade appears to have been handled without major changes in the overall patterns of trade along the lower Niger, in the Igbo hinterland a new marketing ‘grid’, dominated by the Arochuku traders, was created using the pre-existent regional trading networks and religious values as a base.


Author(s):  
Derek A. Dow

SynopsisIn the late eighteenth century the Scottish Highlands were attractive to travellers eager to test themselves against climatic, dietetic and other deprivations. From the early nineteenth century, the Scots themselves became more adventurous and Scottish medical men, notably Mungo Park and David Livingstone, played a prominent part in the exploration of Africa. In the 1860s Livingstone's prolonged travels through the Dark Continent and his belief that he had conquered malarial fever led to the dispatch of the first Christian Mission to the Zambesi region, a venture which failed largely as a result of the missionaries' ignorance of hygiene and medicine.The establishment of the European presence in British Central Africa (now Malawi) was accomplished by representatives of the Scottish Presbyterian Churches in the 1870s. This paper examines some of the problems encountered during the ensuing half century. Specific themes include the impact of developments in transport systems; housing and sanitation; hints on suitable clothing; the presence of trained medical personnel in both Mission and Government and their role in the study of tropical disease; use and abuse of alcohol.


1977 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 162-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
James F. Warren

The impact of the West's commercial intrusion in China towards the end of the eighteenth century had significant bearing on the growth of the slave trade in Southeast Asia. It led to the crystallization of a permanent slave traffic around organized markets and depots in the Sulu Archipelago. Jolo Island, as the centre of a redistributive network encompassing the Sulu zone, became the most important slave centre by 1800. This had not always been the case. Most accounts of the Sulu Sultanate written before 1780 indicate that the internal demand for slaves at Jolo was on a much smaller scale than it was destined to become in the nineteenth century. These early writers reported that it was often more profitable for the Taosug, the dominant ethnic group in the Sulu Archipelago, to deliver slaves to the Magindanao and Bugis merchants of Cotabato (Mindanao) and Pasir (Borneo) for trans-shipment to Makassar and Batavia, than employ them in their own settlements.


1981 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gwyn Campbell

The distinguishing feature of the Malagasy slave trade in the nineteenth century was the co-existence of two competitive slave networks, the one feeding Malagasy slaves to meet the demand of long-distance and regional markets in the western Indian Ocean, and the other channelling Malagasy war captives and East African slaves on to the markets of Imerina. The export of slaves from Madagascar had long existed, but the import of slaves was a new and distinctly nineteenth-century phenomenon, the result of the rise of the Merina empire, whose economy was based on a huge, unremunerated and servile labour force. As the empire expanded, so its labour requirements grew, to conflict sharply with the increasing demand for labour on the neighbouring plantation islands as they shifted over to the production of sugar. Creole merchants found themselves obliged to find alternative labour supplies, and from the 1830s they were moving rapidly down the west coast of Madagascar, where they purchased slaves from chiefs independent of Merina control. Until the outbreak of the Franco-Merina war of 1882–5, the slave-trade networks remained remarkably stable, despite local rivalries. This was due largely to the presence of the Arab Antalaotra, an experienced body of middlemen, and the Indian Karany who supplied the capital for the trade. The war effectively broke the power of the Merina regime, and as the imperial economy crumbled, so security of trade collapsed across the island. Though the disruption of legitimate commerce initially spurred the slave trade, it also strengthened creole calls for French intervention. This occurred in 1895, and the following year the French authorities abolished slavery in Madagascar. This, and the effective military occupation of the island by the French, reduced the Malagasy slave trade to a trickle by the first years of the twentieth century.


1989 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul E. Lovejoy

Recent revisions of estimates for the volume of the trans-Atlantic slave trade suggest that approximately 11,863,000 slaves were exported from Africa during the whole period of the Atlantic slave trade, which is a small upward revision of my 1982 synthesis and still well within the range projected by Curtin in 1969. More accurate studies of the French and British sectors indicate that some revision in the temporal and regional distribution of slave exports is required, especially for the eighteenth century. First, the Bight of Biafra was more important and its involvement in the trade began several decades earlier than previously thought. Secondly, the French and British were more active on the Loango coast than earlier statistics revealed. The southward shift of the trade now appears to have been more gradual and to have begun earlier than I argued in 1982. The greater precision in the regional breakdown of slave shipments is confirmed by new data on the ethnic origins of slaves. The analysis also allows a new assessment of the gender and age profile of the exported population. There was a trend toward greater proportions of males and children. In the seventeenth century, slavers purchased relatively balanced proportions of males and females, and children were under-represented. By the eighteenth century, west-central Africa was exporting twice as many males as females, while West Africa was far from attaining such ratios. In the nineteenth century, by contrast, slavers could achieve those ratios almost anywhere slaves were available for export, and in parts of west-central and south-eastern Africa the percentage of males reached unprecedented levels of 70 per cent or more. Furthermore, increasing numbers of slaves were children, and again west-central Africa led the way in this shift while West Africa lagged behind considerably.This review of the literature on the demography of the slave trade provides a context to assess the revisionist interpretation of David Eltis, who has argued recently that the slave trade and its suppression were of minor importance in African history. It is shown that Eltis' economic arguments, based on an assessment of per capita income and the value of the export trade, are flawed. The demography of the trade involved an absolute loss of population and a large increase in the enslaved population that was retained in Africa. A rough comparison of slave populations in West Africa and the Americas indicates that the scale of slavery in Africa was extremely large.


1966 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie Bethell

As a contribution to the history of Britain's campaign for the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in the nineteenth century this article examines, first, the creation of various mixed commissions for the adjudication of vessels captured on suspicion of trading in slaves after the trade had been declared illegal; secondly, the composition of these mixed commissions and the way in which they functioned, with special reference to the several commissions sitting in Sierra Leone which for 25 years dealt with the majority of captured slave vessels; and thirdly, the reasons why after 1839, and especially after 1845, captured ships were increasingly taken before British vice-admiralty courts with the result that the mixed commissions were gradually allowed to run down, although most of them were not abolished until the Atlantic slave trade had been finally suppressed.


10.28945/2872 ◽  
2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ales Popovic ◽  
Jaka Lindic ◽  
Mojca Indihar Stemberger ◽  
Jurij Jaklic

Institutions of higher education are just like other organizations forced to adapt to the rapidly changing environment that brings many new challenges. There are several obstacles in the way of introducing e-learning in these institutions. We can divide them into technology-based and culturally-based. Many benefits of e-learning such as cost-effectiveness, enhanced responsiveness to change, timely content, flexible accessibility, and providing value to the customer are not based only on use of high technology. We cannot expect that the use of advanced technology is enough to change the way we work as human beings. Technologic solutions in the form of portals have been known for several years. A recurring problem has become the efficiency and usefulness of these solutions. Integration of dispersed sources is not sufficient. Individual users should obtain information in a variety of ways, including in a personalized way. The paper will address the topic of using the Internet as a medium to achieve one of the primary goals of institutions in higher education; that is quality improvement. We will show the influence of the e-learning environment on achieving this goal. The model has also been tested in practice, at the Faculty of Economics at the University of Ljubljana. This case has also proved that cultural changes never take place over night.


Author(s):  
William Beinart ◽  
Lotte Hughes

Disease, we have argued, influenced patterns of colonization, especially in West Africa, the Americas, and Australia (Chapter 2). In turn, imperial transport routes facilitated the spread of certain diseases, such as bubonic plague. This chapter expands our discussion of environmentally related diseases by focusing on trypanosomiasis, carried by tsetse fly, in East and Central Africa. Unlike plague, this disease of humans and livestock was endemic and restricted to particular ecological zones in Africa. But as in the case of plague, the changing incidence of trypanosomiasis was at least in part related to imperialism and colonial intrusion in Africa. Coastal East Africa presented some of the same barriers to colonization as West Africa. Portugal maintained a foothold in South-East Africa for centuries, and its agents expanded briefly onto the Zimbabwean plateau in the seventeenth century, but could not command the interior. Had these early incursions been more successful, southern Africa may have been colonized from the north, rather than by the Dutch and British from the south. Parts of East Africa were a source of slaves and ivory in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The trading routes, commanded by Arab and Swahili African networks, as well as Afro-Portuguese further south, were linked with the Middle East and the Indian Ocean. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, slave-holding expanded within enclaves of East Africa, such as the clove plantations of Zanzibar. When Britain attempted to abolish the slave trade in the early nineteenth century, and policed the West African coast, East and Central African sources briefly became more important for the Atlantic slave trade. African slaves from these areas were taken to Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean. Britain did not have the same intensity of contact with East Africa as with West and southern Africa until the late nineteenth century. There was no major natural resource that commanded a market in Europe and British traders had limited involvement in these slave markets. But between the 1880s and 1910s, most of East and Central Africa was taken under colonial rule, sometimes initially as protectorates: by Britain in Kenya and Uganda; Germany in Tanzania; Rhodes’s British South Africa Company in Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi; and by King Leopold of Belgium in the Congo.


1990 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Winston McGowan

One of the principal objectives of foreign settlements in nineteenth-century West Africa was the establishment of extensive regular trade with Africans, especially residents of the distant, fabled interior. The attainment of this goal, however, proved very difficult. The most spectacular success was achieved by the British settlement at Sierra Leone, which in the early 1820s managed to establish substantial regular trade with the distant hinterland. Its early efforts to achieve this objective, however, were unsuccessful. Until 1818 the development of long-distance trade with the hinterland was impeded by the desultory nature of such efforts, Sierra Leone's opposition to slave trading, competition from established coastal marts, obstructions caused by intermediate states and peoples, and the weaknesses and limitations of the Colony's policy towards commerce and the interior. By 1821, however, the marked decline of the Atlantic slave trade in the neighbourhood of Sierra Leone, the active co-operation of Futa Jallon and Segu, two major trading states in the hinterland, and certain other important developments in the Colony and the interior, combined to establish such trade on a regular basis.


1968 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aylward Shorter

The introduction by the Arabs of new forms of storable wealth, together with fire-arms and gunpowder, into the interior of nineteenth century East Africa gave a direct stimulus to tribal warfare. Among the Nyamwezi of West Central Tanzania, who had practised long-distance trade in ivory before the Arab penetration took place, charismatic war-leaders appeared who created new hegemonies over the smaller, traditional units of these multi-chiefdom societies. These leaders attempted to capture the trade and control the main lines of communication. Mirambo was the most famous of them, but Nyungu-ya-Mawe, who was his exact contemporary (both died in 1884) was, perhaps, more successful. Nyungu created a polity which outlasted his own lifetime by more than a decade.Like Mirambo, he used a corps of professional soldiers called Ruga-ruga to carry out his conquests. The latter included most of the 20,000 square miles of Ukimbu and a part of southern Unyamwezi as well. He skilfully adapted the chiefly institutions of the Kimbu to a wider hegemony, and to an economy based on the large-scale exploitation of Kimbu resources in ivory. By his appointment of vatwale, lieutenants or military governors, as his military, political and economic agents in the various provinces of Ukimbu, he was able to hold his ‘empire’ together. The proliferation of small chiefdoms had been endemic to the Kimbu, a people with a forest economy that imposed both the need for small, political units, and for freedom of movement over a wide area. Nyungu and his vatwale halted this process.Nyungu was Mirambo’s ally in the early years, and was supported by him as the loyalist candidate for the important Nyamwezi chiefdom of Unyanyembe (Tabora). Later, however, in 1880, when Nyungu defeated Mirambo’s powerful vassal, Mtinginya, and seized control of the central caravan route to the coast, relations between the two men became strained. When the Germans dismantled Nyungu’s hegemony in 1895, they destroyed the only realistic attempt ever made to unify an area of extreme political complexity.


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