The Evidence of Things Not Photographed: Slavery and Historical Memory in the British West Indies

2011 ◽  
Vol 113 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krista Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
British West Indies ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Historical Accounts

Slavery and apprenticeship came to an end in the British West Indies in 1838, the year photography was developed as a fixed representational process. No photographs of slavery in the region exist or have been found. Despite this visual lacuna, some recent historical accounts of slavery reproduce photographs that seem to present the period in photographic form. Typically these images date to the late nineteenth century. Rather than see such uses of photography as flawed, or the absence of a photographic archive as prohibitive to the historical construction of slavery, both circumstances generate new understandings of slavery and its connection to post-emancipation economies, of history and its relationship to photography, and of archival absence and its representational possibilities.

John Sarbah, the elder, and African mercantile entrepreneurship in the Gold Coast in the late nineteenth Century

1973 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 653-679 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond E. Dumett
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Ivory Coast ◽  
External Factors ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Commercial Development ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
Distinguished Group

The trading career of John Sarbah of Ghana is illustrative of the activities of a distinguished group of independent African coastal merchants in the late nineteenth century, and an analysis of his business methods helps to cast light on the general problems and operations of mercantile entrepreneurship in West Africa. The rise of the African merchants was the result of an interaction between indigenous and external factors. It would be a mistake to exaggerate the importance of the coastal trading sector in the development of the total economy of the country in the late nineteenth century; but it would appear that the major African merchants, led by John Sarbah, F. C. Grant, J. W. Sey and others, played a larger part in commercial development, 1865 to about 1895, than is commonly recognized in historical accounts. Sarbah's entrepreneurship was mainfested in his ability to manage with competence a network of stores and trading stations, to extend the market for manufactured merchandise, to open up new sources for cash export, and to assess risks and invest capital in his firm's expanision. Of particular importance were Sarbah's efforts to stimulate the collection and processing of palm kernels, to help lay a groundwork for the development of the rubber trade in Asin and Lower Denkyera in the early 1880s, and to extend the orbit of his trading operations to the southeastern Ivory Coast.

“A Modified Form of Slavery”: The Credit and Truck Systems in the Bahamas in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

1986 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 729-753 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Social Control ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Control Mechanisms ◽  
British West Indies ◽  
Cotton Production ◽  
Ruling Elite ◽  
The Bahamas ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Wage Earning

In historical writing on the British West Indies, discussion of the transition from slavery to other forms of labour control after emancipation has been largely confined to the plantation colonies. It is usually argued that planters were most successful in controlling former slaves in colonies where they were able to limit the freedman's access to land and thus create a dependent wage-earning proletariat. Such an analysis cannot, however, be readily applied to the Bahamas, where the plantation system based on cotton production had collapsed before emancipation and where the sea provided an important source of subsistence and employment. This article examines the control mechanisms which enabled a white mercantile minority to consolidate its position as a ruling elite in the postemancipation period. Rather than a monopoly of land, the important elements in this elite's economic and social control were a monopoly of the credit available to the majority of the population and the operation of a system of payment in truck. The credit and truck systems frequently left the lower classes in debt and, as a governor of the colony in the late nineteenth century remarked, in a position of “practical slavery. ”

Shorter Hours and the Protestant Sabbath: Religious Framing and Movement Alliances in Late-Nineteenth-Century Chicago

1999 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
William A. Mirola
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Good Reason ◽  
Cultural Influences ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Industrial Landscape ◽  
Labor Activists ◽  
Significant Case ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Historical Accounts

In the grand scope of American labor history, the fight to abolish Sunday work has been left on the margins of most historical accounts of the more universal fight to shorten the workday. For good reason, some may argue. The Sunday-closing, or Sabbatarian, movement hardly seems comparable in either its scope, its effects, or its long-term significance to the eighthour movement or to an even better known Protestant reform movement: temperance. Nevertheless, the fight to abolish Sunday work represents a significant case study for exploring how cultural influences, particularly religious ones, shaped the late-nineteenth-century industrial landscape. The cultural significance of Sundays drew clergy, labor activists, and employers into a social struggle that was a simultaneous struggle over the meaning of Sundays and how best to put this meaning into industrial and legislative practice.

Contents of Western Sociology of Religion as a Science and Educational Discipline

2002 ◽  
pp. 106-110
Author(s):  
Liudmyla O. Fylypovych
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
International Society ◽  
Sociology Of Religion ◽  
Scientific Study ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The West ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Sociology of religion in the West is a field of knowledge with at least 100 years of history. As a science and as a discipline, the sociology of religion has been developing in most Western universities since the late nineteenth century, having established traditions, forming well-known schools, areas related to the names of famous scholars. The total number of researchers of religion abroad has never been counted, but there are more than a thousand different centers, universities, colleges where religion is taught and studied. If we assume that each of them has an average of 10 religious scholars, theologians, then the army of scholars of religion is amazing. Most of them are united in representative associations of researchers of religion, which have a clear sociological color. Among them are the most famous International Society for the Sociology of Religion (ISSR) and the Society for Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR).

John Lloyd Williams (1854–1945): profile of a Snowdonian botanist

2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Dewi Jones
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Plant Physiology ◽  
Marine Algae ◽  
Plant Distribution ◽  
The Arctic ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Major Study ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Late Nineteenth

John Lloyd Williams was an authority on the arctic-alpine flora of Snowdonia during the late nineteenth century when plant collecting was at its height, but unlike other botanists and plant collectors he did not fully pursue the fashionable trend of forming a complete herbarium. His diligent plant-hunting in a comparatively little explored part of Snowdonia led to his discovering a new site for the rare Killarney fern (Trichomanes speciosum), a feat which was considered a major achievement at the time. For most part of the nineteenth century plant distribution, classification and forming herbaria, had been paramount in the learning of botany in Britain resulting in little attention being made to other aspects of the subject. However, towards the end of the century many botanists turned their attention to studying plant physiology, a subject which had advanced significantly in German laboratories. Rivalry between botanists working on similar projects became inevitable in the race to be first in print as Lloyd Williams soon realized when undertaking his major study on the cytology of marine algae.

Illustrated Media, the Built Environment and Identity Politics in Fin-de-siècle Catalonia: Printing Images, Making the Nation

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-135
Author(s):  
Lucila Mallart
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Constitutive Relationship ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article explores the role of visuality in the identity politics of fin-de-siècle Catalonia. It engages with the recent reevaluation of the visual, both as a source for the history of modern nation-building, and as a constitutive element in the emergence of civic identities in the liberal urban environment. In doing so, it offers a reading of the mutually constitutive relationship of the built environment and the print media in late-nineteenth century Catalonia, and explores the role of this relation as the mechanism by which the so-called ‘imagined communities’ come to exist. Engaging with debates on urban planning and educational policies, it challenges established views on the interplay between tradition and modernity in modern nation-building, and reveals long-term connections between late-nineteenth-century imaginaries and early-twentieth-century beliefs and practices.

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