scholarly journals Money and Currency in African History

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane I. Guyer ◽  
Karin Pallaver
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
African History ◽  
Mobile Money ◽  
The World ◽  
Recent Phase ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade

African peoples have managed multiple currencies, for all the classic four functions of money, for at least a thousand years: within each society’s own circuits, in regional exchange, and across the continent’s borders with the rest of the world. Given the materials of some of these currencies, and the general absence of formalized denominations until the colonial period, some early European accounts defined certain transactions as barter. The management of multiplicity is traced through four eras: a) the precolonial period, with some monies locally produced and acquired, and others imported through intercontinental trades, such as the Atlantic slave trade, and eventually under the expansion of capitalism to Africa; b) the colonial period, when precolonial monies, in some places, still circulated with official monies; c) postcolonial national monies for the new African states; and d) the most recent phase of multiplicity in use, due to migration and sales across borders as well as to the use of new technologies, such as mobile money. The management of multiplicity thereby has a long history and continues to be an inventive frontier. History and ethnography meet on common ground to address these dynamics through empirical study of money in practice, and broader scholarship has drawn on a large variety of original sources.

How Much Is Your African Slave Worth?

differences ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 156-168
Author(s):  
Anthony Bogues
Keyword(s):  
New Technologies ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Black Body ◽  
Modern World ◽  
African Slave ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Racial Slavery

Arguing that racial slavery was a foundation of the modern world and of capitalism, this essay details the historical ways in which the organization of debt and credit networks were integral to the Atlantic slave trade. The author contends that the enslaved body of the African was itself commodified and, as such, opened new technologies of rule. Contemporary forms of commodification, indebtedness, and saturation, the essay concludes, draw from some of the ways in which the enslaved black body was ruled.

Documentation and Reproduction of Colonial Legal Materials in European Libraries

1976 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 188-201
Author(s):  
G. Nwili Okoli
Keyword(s):  
International Association ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
European Countries ◽  
African History ◽  
Academic Institutions ◽  
Academic World ◽  
Legal Documents ◽  
The World ◽  
Potential Demand ◽  
Complete Sets

The emphasis in this paper is on the need for documentation and cooperative reproduction of legal documents relating to the colonial period in Africa which are mainly available in libraries in European countries. It is argued that these materials are extremely useful for research in legal and general scholarship, and that their non-availability in Africa at present is a drawback to the increase of research carried out in Africa. Documentation will make the existence of these materials more widely known in academic institutions than is the case at present, while reproduction through modern techniques will make them available to libraries. Potential demand for the documents, in view of the changing African political scenes, which are cutting across old colonial lines, emphasize the need for their availability. We have chosen the colonial period in African history because the colonial legal documents are obviously out of print and few libraries contain complete sets. As a set of literature, they are difficult for law libraries to acquire, not only in Africa, but also in other parts of the academic world where they may be needed. The International Association of Law Libraries is well placed to coordinate documentation and reprographic exchanges between libraries which have similar requirements in Europe, Africa and other parts of the world.

The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History

2013 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Slave Trade ◽  
African History ◽  
Current State ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Colonial Encounter ◽  
Do So ◽  
State Of The Field

This book critically reflects upon the current state of the field of modern African history. It focuses on the history of the continent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, although also looks back to the era of the Atlantic slave trade. Its aim is to consider the evolution of the field and to set out where, after fifty years of sustained research, it has arrived. To do so, each of its twenty-six chapters explores a particular theme, organized in five sections: Key Themes in African History; The Colonial Encounter; Religion and Belief; Society and Economy; and Arts and the Media.

scholarly journals EXTRAVERSION, CREOLIZATION, AND DEPENDENCY IN THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

2014 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa A. Lindsay
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
African History ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
New Goods ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Atlantic Slavery ◽  
External Connections

AbstractThis article considers the Atlantic slave trade in relation to ‘extraversion’ in African history. Drawing especially on the work of Jean-François Bayart, it argues that slaving fit a long-term pattern in which elites drew on external connections in order to further their wealth and power at home. In doing so, they also opened their societies to new goods and ideas, thus bringing about cultural creolization. This is a different approach to the question of creolization than is commonly found among Americanist studies of Atlantic slavery, which tend to treat cultural change without consideration of politics. The concept of extraversion thus helps to link culture and political economy. Nevertheless, it also bears refinement. Recent scholarship on African involvement in the Atlantic slave trade – some of it detailed in this article – makes clear that extraversion may have reflected African agency, as Bayart insisted, but that it also entangled African societies in destructive relationships of dependency.

Hybridity

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Huddart
Keyword(s):  
Slave Trade ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
The Core ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
Near Future ◽  
Shifting Attention

Hybridity captures various ways in which identities are characterized by complexity or mixed-ness rather than simplicity or purity. It is a term that functions as a description of how things simply are, but it frequently appears to take on the characteristics of a prescription. It is not only that identities on various scales are hybrid, but also that they ought to be hybrid, or should become more hybrid. This prescriptive sense prompts reflection on the processes that drive mixed identities, shifting attention away from a static hybridity toward a dynamic and unending hybridization. The idea’s use in many different disciplinary formations typically implies that, while all identities are minimally hybrid, specific historical shifts have exaggerated and accelerated hybridity. Those shifts are associated with European colonialism, the Atlantic slave trade, neocolonial echoes, globalization, and the rise of the cyborg. Such associations raise the question of resistance to the prescriptive recommendation of hybridity to the extent that hybrid cultures are so frequently an outcome of violent domination. Formerly colonized cultures strive to re-establish more fundamental identities, casting the hybridizing colonial period as a brief if damaging and disruptive interlude. Resistance is also found in former imperial centers, with multiculturalism perceived as a hybridizing threat to the core integrity of a melancholic post-imperialism. And commentators continue to warn that automation and related AI will make unexpectedly diverse jobs obsolete in the very near future, a hybrid cyborg future that occasionally begins to feel more machine than human. Ultimately, it may seem that hybridity is opposed to various forms of indigeneity, purity, or in the most general case, humanity in general. However, such oppositions would be misleading, principally because hybridity as a cultural fact and as a concept implies nothing of necessity. Each context demands specific attention to the ways it is hybrid, the processes of hybridization, and the stabilities that follow.

The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on the Societies of the Western Sudan

1990 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-253 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin A. Klein
Keyword(s):  
Slave Trade ◽  
Political Stability ◽  
African History ◽  
Economic Relationships ◽  
History Of ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Being Moved ◽  
Working Out

Studies of the history of the Atlantic slave trade in Africa have focused on demography and within it on the number of slaves exported from Africa (Curtin 1969; Lovejoy 1982, 1983; Manning 1981). Seen from the perspective of African history, the question of the number exported is a window on larger fields of inquiry and an area open to research, but it is only a small part of the larger question of the impact of the trade on Africa. Working out a reasonable estimate of the number exported does not give us the number lost, for we can only estimate the number killed in wars and raids or the number who died while being moved toward slave markets. Even if the demographic question were the most important one, the most crucial aspect of it would not be the raw statistics of exports but the question of reproduction (Gregory and Cordell 1987). Reproduction involves a host of variables: nutrition, disease, agricultural productivity, security, political stability, and quality of life among others. Most of these are not amenable to precise answers. Furthermore, the question of reproduction leads us to the larger questions of political, social, and economic relationships. This article examines the effects of the slave trade on the institutional structure of Senegambia and the western Sudan and the reproduction of the societies involved.

Causation in Science and the Methods of Scientific Discovery

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rani Lill Anjum ◽  
Stephen Mumford
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Scientific Discovery ◽  
Significant Degree ◽  
Philosophical Approach ◽  
The World

Some of the chief goals of science are understanding, explanation, prediction, and application in new technologies. Only if the world has some significant degree of constancy in what follows from what can these activities be conducted with any purpose. But what is the source of such predictability and how does it operate? This is a question that goes beyond science itself and inevitably requires a philosophical approach. It is argued in such terms that causation is the main foundation upon which the possibility of science rests. But what methods should we adopt in order to identify causes in science? The choice of methods will inevitably reflect what one takes causation to be, making an accurate account of causation an even more pressing matter. The enquiry concerns the correct norms for the empirical study of the world. This matters a lot. Some of the greatest challenges that we face will only be solved if we understand what has caused the problem and what, if anything, could then cause its alleviation.

scholarly journals Hiszpański Ruch 15-M: tożsamość projektowa in statu nascendi

2012 ◽  
pp. 155-175
Author(s):  
Paweł Zerka
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Group Identity ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Late Modernity ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The World ◽  
Group Identities ◽  
Global Movement ◽  
Group Resistance

 The Spanish movement of May 15th (15-M) has become a reference point for other groups of indignados, which have emerged in different parts of the world. This is why 15-M has already inspired a number of studies by Spanish and foreign scholars, both in the camp of sociology and in political science. It has also aroused a rising of interest among journalists. In this study, we make a fi rst step towards better understanding of the 15-M movement, by trying to define its group identity. Our analysis point to an evolutionary nature of the movement. Initially, it was rather chaotic and lacking coherence, but with time it acquired several proper characteristics, among them domination of young people, political indifference, pacifism, as well as a widespread use of new technologies. Besides, while resistance and discontent served as its common ground at the very beginning, after that the movement has bacome an advocate of a specific social change. Its idea of a change has consisted in the development of partcipatory democracy, in the harnessing of the global capitalism, and in the provision of social justice and adequate conditions for self-fulfillment for individuals. Such a transformation inside the movement is consistent with the theory of “group identities“ developed by Manuel Castels. The Spanish sociologist argues that in the network society of our times, group identities are based most of all on group resistance and only afterwards they can transform into project identities. In this particular example, such a transformation may have been fostered by the emergence of several other points of resistance in the world, inspired by the Spanish movement. Nevertheless, the durability of 15-M’s group identity will depend on its ability to influence the current domestic politics. Interestingly, the Spanish indignados seem to embody many transformations typical for modern societies, defined by Anthony Giddens as a passage towards the “late modernity“. Their demands are in many respects convergent with the program of “life politics“, described by this British sociologist. The passage towards the late modernity is also visible in the global reach of their protests. On one hand, they raise the issue of global processes haveing local effects. On the other hand, their protests have a clearly expansionary nature. With the emergence of several other groups of indignados, for example in United States or in Chile, the 15-M may become an avant-garde of a wider global movement. At the same time, it has become clear that, regardless of a particular economic, political and social context which undoubtedly served as a catalyst for social unrest in Spain, the identity of the 15-M movement is based strongly on universal values, going far beyond the domestic context.

Africa and Africans in the World Wars: The Prelude and Disposition for Leveraged Exploitation through Violence and Coercion

2021 ◽  
pp. 002190962110549
Author(s):  
EC Ejiogu ◽  
Nneka L. Umego
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
New World ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
World War ◽  
The World ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade

This article argues that there is a set twin repertoires of coercion and violence that consistently characterized Europe’s involvement in Africa starting with its trans-Atlantic slave trade in which millions of able-bodied Africans were transported against their will to the New World where they were forced to labor as chattels in plantations, through the trade in produce commodities, conquest, and de facto occupation of the continent to the two World Wars when African commodity produce and manpower were impressed and utilized in the win the war efforts. Both repertoires remain handy all through the above-listed endeavors, and without them, it could have been extremely impossible for Europeans to successfully pull each one of them off. An analysis that factors both repertoires in reveals that the era of conquest and occupation of Africa flowed seamlessly into the era of World War I when the European powers that colonized Africa relied on them to impress Africans as manpower for its win the war efforts. For one to better understand each of the six endeavors, one needs to understand all six.

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