Landlords and Strangers

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher R. DeCorse
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Diverse Communities ◽  
Commercial Enterprise ◽  
Archaeological Work ◽  
Political Traditions ◽  
Atlantic Economy

Drawing on historical sources and archaeological work, this chapter considers the varied communities associated with the British forts and outposts of West Africa and places them in their wider economic and cultural contexts. Beginning with founding of the first English fort in Ghana in the 1630s through the construction of the smaller proto-colonial defensive works of the nineteenth century, British trading companies established dozens of outposts of varying size and duration on the Guinea coast. Although all primarily established for trade within an expanding sphere of British commercial enterprise, the outposts and the communities with which they were associated differed in terms of their histories, the cultural interactions represented, and their component populations. Predominantly African, the diverse communities associated with these forts underscore both the ways in which the expanding Atlantic economy structured these intersections and how African social, cultural, and political traditions shaped the entanglements that unfolded.

An 1804 Slaving Contract Signed in Arabic Script From the Upper Guinea Coast

1987 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 341-348 ◽  
Author(s):  
George E. Brooks ◽  
Bruce L. Mouser
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
Merchant Ship ◽  
Arabic Script ◽  
Slave Traders ◽  
Image Position

Few slaving agreements contracted between African sellers and American purchasers appear to have survived. They were rarely committed to paper, were destroyed after commitments were fulfilled, or were removed from business records kept by slave traders. The contract discussed here is of considerable interest as a document which, although brief, records important information and offers intriguing insights concerning African-European and African-African relationships in Guinea-Conakry at the turn of the nineteenth century.The slaving contract is dated 15 November 1804, and apparently was negotiated aboard the merchant ship Charlotte of Bristol, Rhode Island, Jonathan Sabens, master, anchored at the Iles de Los archipelago.Nov. th[ursday] 15-1804Shipe Charlottefortay days after date I Promas to pay Jno. Sabens or orde[r] nin[e] hundard and ni[ne]ty five Bars to be Pade in Rice and Slave Say fore tun of Rice at nity Bars par tun the Remandr in Slaves at one hundard and Twenty Bars par Slave.[signed in Arabic] Fadmod [Fendan Modu Dumbuya][signed in Arabic] Muhammad Sa'ab shokr Mohammed Sakib Fana/Ta/ Mohammed Shabaan(the month before Ramadan)Respecting the American traders involved, the Charlotte was jointly owned by George D'Wolf and Jonathan Sabens of Bristol, Rhode Island. Captain Jonathan Sabens was an experienced mariner, involved in at least three previous slaving voyages, including one as master of the Charlotte. Members of the D'Wolf family were associated with numerous slaving voyages to west Africa and continued to invest in slaving ventures long after Rhode Island made the trade illegal in 1787.

The Slave Trade and Coastal West Africa

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth G. Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Heritage Tourism ◽  
West African ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
African Countries ◽  
Archaeological Work

The Atlantic slave trade has been the focus of archaeological work in a number of West African countries. Much of the work has emphasized the impressive trade castles of the Ghana coast, where extensive European constructions demonstrate the importance of the slave trade in the regions’ history. Work has also been conducted on other settings, including in Bénin, where African agency manifested itself differently than on the Gold Coast of modern Ghana; Sierra Leone and Gambia, where European trading establishments were typically smaller; and Guinea, where the ‘illegal’ slave trade of the nineteenth century blossomed. Many of these sites of enslavement have become important parts of local heritage, as well as a global heritage of African-descended people and the heritage tourism associated with the African Diaspora.

A poisonous plant of the genus Datura (Solanaceae) in an eighteenth-century Danish garden in West Africa

2003 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-159
Author(s):  
Daniel Hopkins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
West African ◽  
Ornamental Plant ◽  
Poisonous Plant ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century

There was disagreement among colonialists about whether the Africans around the Danish West African forts made use of native poisons in the early nineteenth century, but it appears that the Danes themselves may have introduced a poisonous ornamental plant of the genus Datura in one of their own gardens on the Guinea Coast.

scholarly journals “Far more fair than black”: Othellos on the Chilean Stage

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (37) ◽  
pp. 139-170
Author(s):  
Paula Baldwin Lind
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Development ◽  
Skin Colour ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Exact Date ◽  
Visual Dimension ◽  
History Of ◽  
Shakespearean Tragedy

This article reviews part of the stage history of Shakespeare’s Othello in Chile and, in particular, it focuses on two performances of the play: the first, in 1818, and the last one in 2012-2020. By comparing both productions, I aim to establish the exact date and theatrical context of the first Chilean staging of the Shakespearean tragedy using historical sources and English travellers’ records, as well as to explore how the representation of a Moor and of blackness onstage evolved both in its visual dimension — the choice of costumes and the use of blackface—, and in its racial connotations alongside deep social changes. During the nineteenth century Othello became one of the most popular plays in Chile, being performed eleven times in the period of 31 years, a success that also occurred in Spain between 1802 and 1833. The early development of Chilean theatre was very much influenced not only by the ideas of the Spaniards who arrived in the country, but also by the available Spanish translations of Shakespeare; therefore, I argue that the first performances of Othello as Other — different in origin and in skin colour — were characterised by an imitative style, since actors repeated onstage the biased image of Moors that Spaniards had brought to Chile. While the assessment of Othello and race is not new, this article contrasts in its scope, as I do not discuss the protagonist’s actual origin, but how the changes in Chilean social and cultural contexts can reshape and reconfigure the performance of blackness and turn it into a meaningful translation of the Shakespearean Moor that activates audiences’ awareness of racism and fears of miscegenation.

العربية المقاربة المقاصديّة في ردّ ابن فودي على القادح في جلستهم الدعويّة

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alawiye Abdulmumin Abdurrazzaq ◽  
Ahmad Wifaq Mokhtar ◽  
Abdul Manan Ismail
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Analytical Methods ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Subject

This article is aimed to examine the extent of the application of Islamic legal objectives by Sheikh Abdullah bn Fudi in his rejoinder against one of their contemporary scholars who accused them of being over-liberal about the religion. He claimed that there has been a careless intermingling of men and women in the preaching and counselling gathering they used to hold, under the leadership of Sheikh Uthman bn Fudi (the Islamic reformer of the nineteenth century in Nigeria and West Africa). Thus, in this study, the researchers seek to answer the following interrogations: who was Abdullah bn Fudi? who was their critic? what was the subject matter of the criticism? How did the rebutter get equipped with some guidelines of higher objectives of Sharĩʻah in his rejoinder to the critic? To this end, this study had tackled the questions afore-stated by using inductive, descriptive and analytical methods to identify the personalities involved, define and analyze some concepts and matters considered as the hub of the study.

A Structured Method for the Recognition of Complex Historical Tables

1997 ◽  
Vol 9 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 58-77
Author(s):  
Vitaly Kliatskine ◽  
Eugene Shchepin ◽  
Gunnar Thorvaldsen ◽  
Konstantin Zingerman ◽  
Valery Lazarev
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Character Recognition ◽  
Optical Character Recognition ◽  
Complex Structure ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Tax Assessment ◽  
Optical Character ◽  
Algorithmic Model ◽  
Machine Readable

In principle, printed source material should be made machine-readable with systems for Optical Character Recognition, rather than being typed once more. Offthe-shelf commercial OCR programs tend, however, to be inadequate for lists with a complex layout. The tax assessment lists that assess most nineteenth century farms in Norway, constitute one example among a series of valuable sources which can only be interpreted successfully with specially designed OCR software. This paper considers the problems involved in the recognition of material with a complex table structure, outlining a new algorithmic model based on ‘linked hierarchies’. Within the scope of this model, a variety of tables and layouts can be described and recognized. The ‘linked hierarchies’ model has been implemented in the ‘CRIPT’ OCR software system, which successfully reads tables with a complex structure from several different historical sources.

Liszt at the Piano: The Impact of Iconography on mid-Nineteenth Century Musicology

2014 ◽  
Vol 55 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 131-144
Author(s):  
Suzanne Marie Francis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Music History ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Maximum Benefit ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Iconic Status ◽  
The Impact

By the time of his death in 1827, the image of Beethoven as we recognise him today was firmly fixed in the minds of his contemporaries, and the career of Liszt was beginning to flower into that of the virtuosic performer he would be recognised as by the end of the 1830s. By analysing the seminal artwork Liszt at the Piano of 1840 by Josef Danhauser, we can see how a seemingly unremarkable head-and-shoulders bust of Beethoven in fact holds the key to unlocking the layers of commentary on both Liszt and Beethoven beneath the surface of the image. Taking the analysis by Alessandra Comini as a starting point, this paper will look deeper into the subtle connections discernible between the protagonists of the picture. These reveal how the collective identities of the artist and his painted assembly contribute directly to Beethoven’s already iconic status within music history around 1840 and reflect the reception of Liszt at this time. Set against the background of Romanticism predominant in the social and cultural contexts of the mid 1800s, it becomes apparent that it is no longer enough to look at a picture of a composer or performer in isolation to understand its impact on the construction of an overall identity. Each image must be viewed in relation to those that preceded and came after it to gain the maximum benefit from what it can tell us.

Rethinking Mahler

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Structural Analysis ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Temporal Experience ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Literature History ◽  
Historical Past

Gustav Mahler’s anniversary years (2010–11) have provided an opportunity to rethink the composer’s position within the musical, cultural and multi-disciplinary landscapes of the twenty-first century, as well as to reassess his relationship with the historical traditions of his own time. Comprising a collection of essays by leading and emerging scholars in the field, Rethinking Mahler in part counterbalances common scholarly assumptions and preferences which predominantly configure Mahler as proto-modernist, with hitherto somewhat neglected consideration of his debt to, and his re-imagining of, the legacies of his own historical past. It reassesses his engagement both with the immediate creative and cultural present of the late nineteenth century, and with the weight of a creative and cultural past that was the inheritance of artists living and working at that time. From a variety of disciplinary perspectives the contributors pursue ideas of nostalgia, historicism and ‘pastness’ in relation to an emergent pluralist modernity and subsequent musical-cultural developments. Mahler’s relationship with music, media and ideas past, present, and future is explored in three themed sections, addressing among them issues in structural analysis; cultural contexts; aesthetics; reception; performance, genres of stage, screen and literature; history/historiography; and temporal experience.

PAWNSHIP, DEBT, AND ‘FREEDOM’ IN ATLANTIC AFRICA DURING THE ERA OF THE SLAVE TRADE: A REASSESSMENT

2014 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul E. Lovejoy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
Congo River

AbstractA reassessment of the institution of pawnship in Africa for the period from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century tightens the reference to situations in which individuals were held as collateral for debts that had been incurred by others, usually relatives. Contrary to the assumptions of some scholars, pawnship was not related to poverty and enslavement for debt but rather to commercial liquidity and the mechanisms by which funds were acquired to promote trade or to cover the expenses of funerals, weddings, and religious obligations. A distinction is made, therefore, between enslavement for debt and pawnship. It is demonstrated that pawnship characterized trade with European and American ships in many parts of Atlantic Africa, but not everywhere. While pawnship was common north of the Congo River, at Gabon, Cameroon, Calabar, the interior of the Bights of Biafra and Benin, the Gold Coast, and the upper Guinea coast, it was illegal in most of Muslim Africa and the Portuguese colony of Angola, while it was not used in commercial dealings with Europeans at Bonny, Ouidah, and other places.

scholarly journals La datation du choeur de l’église de Vaucelles reproduit en plan par Villard de Honnecourt

2018 ◽  
Vol 81 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-417
Author(s):  
Laurence Terrier Aliferis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
The West ◽  
West Side ◽  
Villard De Honnecourt ◽  
The Church

Abstract The ruined Cistercian church of Vaucelles is known only by a few preserved fragments and a plan of the choir reproduced by Villard of Honnecourt. Historical sources provide three key dates: 1190 (start of construction), 1215 (entry into the new church), 1235 (date of the dedication). From the nineteenth century until now, it was considered that the foundations were laid in 1190 and that the construction started on the west side of the church. In 1216, the nave would have been completed, and the choir would have been built between 1216 and 1235. Consultation of the historical sources and examination of the historiographic record changes this established chronology of the site. In fact, the construction proceeded from east to west. The choir reproduced in 1216 or shortly before by Villard de Honnecourt presents the building as it then appeared, with the eastern part of the building totally completed.

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