Emerging Modernities in 19th Century Africa

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Shumway
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
The United States ◽  
Eastern Africa ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Christian Mission ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
European Colonization ◽  
Private Entrepreneurs ◽  
The 19Th Century

While the single most consequential event in Africa during the 19th century was European colonization of the continent, most of the century was characterized by tremendous growth and innovation in African political and economic institutions, as well as the expansion of literacy and the development of enduring intellectual traditions. Many African societies were making strides toward the creation of new self-governing nations over the course of the 19th century, as the ending of the transatlantic slave trade made way for the development of new industries and commercial systems. Large powerful states governed in numerous places across the continent, including the Sokoto and Tukulor Empires, Asante, Dahomey, Egypt, Buganda, Bunyoro, and Ethiopia. Many African states had powerful armies and distinct political identities. The emergence of modernities in 19th-century Africa also came in the form of religious change. This era saw the expansion of Islam in rural areas of western, northern, and eastern Africa, accompanied by the rapid growth of Islamic education and literacy. At the same time, Christian mission societies facilitated the establishment of mission schools and colleges based on European institutions of higher education. The new class of mission-educated African elites included teachers, clergymen, doctors, civil servants, law clerks, journalists, private entrepreneurs, and academics. These individuals, mostly men, had a profound influence on African visions of modern nationhood, particularly in West and Southern Africa. In many ways, Africa was becoming modern in the decades prior to the European conquests of the late 19th century. For the purposes of this article, “modernity” refers to the cultural and social revolution that accompanied the rise of industrial capitalism and included an expansive universalism. The development of modernity in Africa and elsewhere was linked to the new age of science, economics, realism, rationalism, and humanism dawning toward the end of the 18th and start of the 19th century. In particular, the newly founded colonies of Sierra Leone and Liberia became centers for the diffusion of African-American cultural influence, as liberated former slaves and their descendants from the British Empire, the United States, maroon communities, and captured slave ships settled there. In order to appreciate the 19th-century development of African modernity, it is important to remember, as A. Adu Boahen once explained, that European colonization of the African continent occurred suddenly and unpredictably. As late as 1880, there was little indication that European nations intended to dramatically alter the map of Africa by force. Most African states and societies were entirely autonomous and controlled by their own rulers. The unexpected European conquest of African territories at the end of the 19th century thwarted much of the progress Africans had made throughout that century and arguably reversed key processes of modernization. And while colonial regimes also introduced new modernities into Africa, these were mainly destructive and exploitative in nature.

Schooling in the United States

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Floyd M. Hammack
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
United States ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Educational Expectations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Formal Schooling ◽  
Large Expansion ◽  
Adult Status ◽  
The 19Th Century

The rise of schooling, from a peripheral activity of religious groups and some elites to a virtually universal and global experience of nearly all children, has been the object of study for over a century. Socialization, usually accomplished within the family, is how young people were traditionally brought into the skills and knowledge required by adult status. A few were chosen for more specialized and formalized education, among them priests, but “going to school” was a very uncommon human experience until the 19th century in the United States, when the “common school movement” established schools in rural areas and cities. By the second half of the 19th century, mass elementary schooling was in place and the expansion of “comprehensive” secondary education had begun. After World War II, a similar pattern of growth in higher education began to take shape. Increasingly called “postsecondary schooling,” the kinds of organizations offering this level of education were diverse, with a large expansion of public institutions, two- and four-year degree programs, and a robust private sector. As this expansion has taken place, the content of schooling, as well as the forms it has assumed, has grown. The questions scholars have asked about this phenomenon include “why has it taken place?” and “what are its consequences?” This article will focus on the literature documenting the expansion of schooling in the United States, the explanations that have been developed for this expansion, and assessments of its consequences. “Functional” (including human capital) explanations have stressed the technical demands of the labor market as the economy has moved from one based on extraction of resources (like farming) to manufacturing, and on to service activities. This view asserts that formal schooling needed to be expanded to transfer the cognitive skills required to attain independent adult status in the new economy. Alternatively, “conflict” theories see education as a tool used by competing groups to exclude nonmembers from eligibility for positions that provide high rewards. Dominant groups shape educational expectations and content in ways that privilege their own members, thus sustaining their dominance. Finally, “neo-institutional” explanations emphasize how education has become the chief legitimate mechanism for selection of people to adult statuses in society. These perspectives include a vast literature into which this essay will provide entrée. After assaying the theoretical literature, this report will examine the consequences of educational expansion for some specific educational topics, including early childhood education, the “college for all” movement, women in higher education, and the rise of community colleges and for-profit colleges.

British Antislavery and West Africa

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Padraic Scanlan
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Black People ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Christian Teaching ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
The 19Th Century

Resistance to slavery within African societies was as complex and heterogeneous as slavery itself. For enslaved Africans and their descendants taken by force to Europe’s colonies in the Americas, antislavery was an existential struggle. Among European states, Britain was among the first imperial powers to pass laws abolishing its slave trade (in 1807) and slavery in its colonies (in 1833). Antislavery was a transnational phenomenon, but Britain made suppressing the Atlantic slave trade an element of its foreign policy, employing a Royal Navy squadron to search for slave ships, pressing African leaders to sign anti-slave-trade treaties as a condition of trade and coordinating an international network of anti-slave-trade courts. And yet, for many leading British abolitionists, “Africa” was an ideological sandbox—an imagined blank space for speculation and experiment on the development of human societies and the progress of “civilization.” In the 18th century, early British critics of the transatlantic slave trade argued that “Africa” presented an unparalleled commercial and imperial opportunity. Although the slave trade—and the plantations in the Americas that slave ships supplied with labor—were profitable, some argued that slave-trading regions could, with enough investment, produce goods and commodities that would be many times more lucrative. Moreover, if Britain were the first European power to abolish the slave trade, it might also be among the first to gain a territorial foothold on African soil. Over time, these arguments coalesced into the concept of “legitimate commerce.” A combination of Christian teaching, slave-trade suppression, and commercial incentives would persuade slave-trading polities to give up the practice and instead produce other goods. Legitimate commerce intertwined with a theory of civilization that held that any society that enslaved people was so degenerate in its social development that nearly any reform or intervention was justifiable. By the end of the 19th century, antislavery became a justification for European conquest. There were at least three broad reform projects launched by British officials and merchants in Africa in the name of antislavery. First, drawing on critiques of the slave trade from the 18th century that emphasized the commercial potential of legitimate commerce, antislavery activists and politicians argued for replacing the slave trade with new kinds of export-oriented commerce. Second, in two colonies, Sierra Leone and Liberia, Britain and the United States experimented with the possibility of using Black people from the African diaspora as settlers and missionaries. In Sierra Leone, more than seventy thousand people, usually known as “Liberated Africans,” were repatriated from slave ships into the small colony. Third, in the mid-19th century, as the transatlantic slave trade declined, Britain and other European powers invested heavily in African plantation agriculture, particularly in cotton and palm oil monocrops.

Afghanistan: Martial Society Without Military Rule

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amin Tarzi
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Central Government ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Military Campaigns ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The Military

Since its inception as a separate political entity in 1747, Afghanistan has been embroiled in almost perpetual warfare, but it has never been ruled directly by the military. From initial expansionist military campaigns to involvement in defensive, civil, and internal consolidation campaigns, the Afghan military until the mid-19th century remained mainly a combination of tribal forces and smaller organized units. The central government, however, could only gain tenuous monopoly over the use of violence throughout the country by the end of the 19th century. The military as well as Afghan society remained largely illiterate and generally isolated from the prevailing global political and ideological trends until the middle of the 20th century. Politicization of Afghanistan’s military began in very small numbers after World War II with Soviet-inspired communism gaining the largest foothold. Officers associated with the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan were instrumental in two successful coup d’états in the country. In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, ending the country’s sovereignty and ushering a period of conflict that continues to the second decade of the 21st century in varying degrees. In 2001, the United States led an international invasion of the country, catalyzing efforts at reorganization of the smaller professional Afghan national defense forces that have remained largely apolitical and also the country’s most effective and trusted governmental institution.

The Feminization of Etiquette Literature: Foucault, Mechanisms of Social Change, and the Paradoxes of Empowerment

1996 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-434 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Arditi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Change ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Women’S Empowerment ◽  
Discursive Space ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Space ◽  
The 19Th Century

This paper explores the opening of a discursive space within the etiquette literature in the United States during the 19th century and how women used this space as a vehicle of empowerment. It identifies two major strategies of empowerment. First, the use or appropriation of existing discourses that can help redefine the “other” within an hegemonic space. Second, and more importantly, the transformation of that space in shifting the lines by which differentiation is produced to begin with. Admittedly, these strategies are neither unique nor the most important in the history of women's empowerment. But this paper argues that the new discourses formulated by women helped forge a new space within which women ceased being the “other,” and helped give body to a concept of womanhood as defined by a group of women, regardless of how idiosyncratic that group might have been.

Samuel Ajayi Crowther, 1806–1891

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oluwatoyin Oduntan
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern State ◽  
European Colonization ◽  
History Of ◽  
Christian Missionary ◽  
The 19Th Century

The case for narrating the history of slavery and emancipation through the biography of enslaved Africans is strongly supported by the life and experiences of Samuel Ajayi Crowther. Kidnapped into slavery in 1821, recaptured and settled in Sierra Leone in 1822, he became a missionary in 1845, founder of the Niger mission in 1857, and Bishop of the Niger Mission in 1864. His life and career covered the span of the 19th century during which revolutionary forces like jihadist revolutions, the abolition of the slave trade, the rise of a new Westernized elite, and European colonization created the roots of the modern state system in West Africa. He was intricately tied to the Christian Missionary Society (CMS), Britain’s antislavery evangelical movement, resulting in Ajayi becoming the poster face of slavery, its acclaimed product of abolitionism, the preeminent advocate of evangelical emancipation, and the organizer of practical emancipation in West Africa. The leader of a very small group of Africans who worked diligently against the slave trade and domestic slavery, Ajayi also became a victim of the use of that agenda by imperialists. Thus, the contrasts of his life (i.e., slavery/freedom, nationalist/hybrid, preacher/investor, leader/weakling, linguist/literalist, etc.) were celebrated by himself, his patrons, and his evangelical followers on one hand, and denounced by his critics on the other. They underline the disagreements over his legacy, and indeed over the understanding of the institution of slavery, abolition, and emancipation in West Africa.

THE TOWNSEND JOURNAL: ACCOUNTING FOR THE MARITIME TRADE IN 1840s BOSTON BASED ON B. F. FOSTER'S APPROACH

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brandi L Holley ◽  
Dale L. Flesher
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Economic Growth ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Joint Venture ◽  
Young Men ◽  
The United States ◽  
Maritime Trade ◽  
The 19Th Century

ABSTRACT: The 19th century brought on much economic growth and advancement in accounting in the United States. The teaching of accounting began to veer away from rules and instead sought the logical underpinnings of the system. It was a time when accounting evolved into accountancy through the development of theory, such as the proprietary theory and the theory of two-account series. The Townsend Journal (1840-1841), which chronicles the joint venture between two young men in the Boston maritime trade, is a case study of this progression in commerce and accounting during this pivotal time. B. F. Foster's contemporaneous Boston publications on bookkeeping provide the framework to understand this evolution in accountancy, as well as the recordings in the Townsend Journal. Through the examination of the Townsend Journal alongside B. F. Foster's texts, this paper preserves and illustrates a historical link in the evolution of the field.

2. The rise of black abolitionism and global antislavery struggles

Abolitionism ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 29-46
Author(s):  
Richard S. Newman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
French Government ◽  
Slave Rebellion ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
The 19Th Century

As a new century loomed, black activists pushed abolition forward across the Atlantic world. The greatest example came in Saint-Domingue, where a slave rebellion in the 1790s compelled the French government to issue a broad emancipation decree. “The rise of black abolitionism and global antislavery struggles” explains how a more assertive brand of abolitionism also developed in the United States, as free black communities rebuked American statesmen for allowing racial oppression to prosper, arguing that slavery and segregation violated the American creed of liberty and justice for all. Several European and American nations banned the slave trade in the early 1800s, but slavery proved to be a resilient institution in the 19th century.

Classical Architecture in Europe and North America since 1700

Classics ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Classical Architecture ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
The 19Th Century

Since the Western Roman Empire collapsed, classical, or Greco-Roman, architecture has served as a model to articulate the cultural, artistic, political, and ideological goals of later civilizations, empires, nations, and individuals. The Renaissance marked the first major, widespread re-engagement with classical antiquity in art, literature, and architecture. Debates over classical antiquity and its relation to the modern world continued ever since. One such important debate was that of the quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns, which resulted when Charles Perrault published his Parallèles des anciens et des modernes in 1688. This dispute focused on whether the modern age could surpass antiquity, especially in literature. The Greco-Roman controversy (1750s and 1760s) was another example of Europeans engaging with the classical past; this debate focused on whether Greek or Roman art was of greater historical value; an argument has continued unabated to this day. Figures like Johann Joachim Winckelmann argued (in publications such as Winckelmann 1764, cited under Early Archaeological Publications on Greece and Classical Ruins in the Roman East, on Greek art) for the supremacy of Greek forms, while others like Giovanni Battista Piranesi (whose 1748–1778 views of Rome are reproduced in Ficacci 2011, cited under Early Archaeological Publications on Italy) advocated for Rome’s preeminence. Such debates demonstrate how classical antiquity was an essential part of the intellectual and artistic milieu of 18th-century Europe. This bibliography focuses on the appropriation of classical architecture in the creation of built forms from 1700 to the present in Europe and North America, which is typically called neoclassical or neo-classical, both of which are acceptable. Scholars often define the neoclassical period as lasting from c. 1750 to 1830, when European art and architecture predominantly appropriated classical forms and ideas. The influence of classical architecture continued in popularity throughout the 19th century and early 20th century in the United States. The early 19th century saw the flourishing of the Greek Revival, where Greek forms dominated artistic and architectural production, both in Europe and the United States. The ascendance of Queen Victoria in 1837 marked a shift toward a preference for the Gothic and Medieval forms. Neoclassical forms saw a resurgence in the second half of the 19th century, as Roman architectural forms became increasingly popular as an expression of empire. The term “Neo-classical” was coined as early as January 1872 by Robert Kerr, who used the term positively. It later took on certain negative overtones, when it was used as a derogatory epithet by an unknown writer in the Times of London in 1892. Neoclassical architecture has fared no better with the rise of modernism in the early 20th century onward and since then it has been seen as old-fashioned and derivative. Neoclassical architecture was not a mindless imitation of classical architectural forms and interiors. The interest in classical architecture and the creation of neoclassical architecture was spurred on by important archaeological discoveries in the mid-18th century, which widened the perception of Greek and Roman buildings. The remarkable flexibility of ancient architecture to embody the grandeur of an empire, as well as the principles of a nascent democracy, meant that it had great potential to be interpreted and reinterpreted by countless architects, patrons, empires, and nation states—in different ways and at different times from the 18th to the 20th century. This bibliography is organized thematically (e.g., General Overviews; Companions, Handbooks, and Theoretical Works; Reference Works; Early General Archaeological Publications; The Reception of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and the Bay of Naples; and World’s Fairs and Expositions) and then geographically, creating country- or region-specific bibliographies. While this model of organization has some flaws, it aims to avoid repetition and highlights the interconnected nature and process of the reception of classical architecture in later periods.

USA and Empire in the 19th Century

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christa Dierksheide
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Santo Domingo ◽  
Continental Scale ◽  
Land Mass ◽  
Human Cost ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
American Nation

During the course of the 19th century, the United States forged an empire on a continental scale and also made significant territorial gains overseas. While it had taken the British Empire a little over two centuries to settle the swath of land stretching between the Appalachian Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean, the fledgling postcolonial American nation managed to colonize a land mass several times larger in a fraction of the time. But all this expansion came at an enormous human cost, resulting in the death or removal of countless native peoples, the enslavement of millions of African Americans, and sectional tensions that led to the American Civil War. During the latter part of the century, Americans began pursuing an imperial project beyond the continent, waging war or initiating annexation projects in Santo Domingo, Cuba, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. The sources collected here reflect the dynamism, contingency, and tragedy of American colonization efforts between 1776 and 1900.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document