Sahelian Migrations Within Africa

This chapter will examine patterns and history of intra-African migration from the Sahel across national borders within Africa, beginning in the colonial period. During colonization, the French often recruited West African workers across borders who served in the army and provided security for French trading posts along the African coasts. At the time of decolonization, shopkeepers in marketplaces, as well as big merchants or gem traders from the Sahel were also entrepreneurs, occupying an intermediate position between native populations and national authorities in international trade networks. Over the decades, tougher controls at borders and intensified deportations despite regional agreements on the free movement of people, the outbreak of civil wars, or of political turmoil have all had a significant impact on population movements from the Sahel, and have also increased insecurity for Sahelian migrants.

From Labrador to Leipzig: Film and Infrastructures Along the Fur Trail

Background: Since 1919, the Hudson’s Bay Company has sponsored films to document and advertise its trading operations. Films such as Hudson’s Bay Company Centenary Celebrations (1919), The Heritage of Adventure (1920), and Leipzig Exhibition footage (1930) offered views of North American landscapes and Hudson’s Bay Company trading posts and department stores alongside ethnographic footage of Indigenous Peoples. Analysis: Drawing on archival research conducted at the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives and textual film analysis of these “fur films,” this article theorizes their production and circulation within settler visual culture. Conclusions and implications: Tracing the films’ paths from the Eastern Arctic to Montréal, and from London, England, to Leipzig, Germany, this article demonstrates how these moving pictures participate in the entanglement of settler and infrastructural projects that characterize early twentieth-century Canada. Contexte : Depuis 1919, la Compagnie de la Baie d’Hudson a commandité des films pour rendre compte de ses opérations commerciales et pour faire connaître celles-ci. Des films comme Hudson’s Bay Company Centenary Celebrations (1919), The Heritage of Adventure (1920), et Leipzig Exhibition Footage (1930) offrent des perspectives sur des paysages nord-américains et sur les postes de traite et les magasins à rayons de la Compagnie ainsi que des scènes de peuples autochtones à valeur ethnographique. Analyse : Cet article se fonde sur une recherche menée aux Archives de la Compagnie de la Baie d’Hudson et sur une analyse textuelle de « films à fourrures » pour examiner la production et la circulation de ces derniers dans un contexte de culture visuelle colonisatrice. Conclusions et implications : Cet article retrace les parcours de ces films de l’Arctique de l’Est jusqu’à Montréal, et de Londres, Angleterre jusqu’à Leipzig, Allemagne, en démontrant comment ceux-ci contribuent à l’enchevêtrement de projets coloniaux et infrastructurels qui caractérise le Canada au début du 20e siècle.

Relation Database Covering Black Sea Region Prosopographical Studies of Italian Black Sea Trading Posts (13th - 15th cc.)

The article discusses the process of database creation that covers notarial documents telling us about the history of an Italian trading post Tana (Azov). The material for the database has been collected over several years as part of a research addressing a set of documents about the history of medieval Italy. In the course of the research a considerable body of material has been collected. Its analysis was a hard task since data were arranged in a peculiar way. To achieve the goal a relational database consisting of sixteen tables which in turn contained several dozen fields has been created on the basis of DBMS Access. The article also describes the main goals and difficulties the database creation is accompanied by as well as those emerging when analysis by means of inquires is made. These are identification of names mentioned in the sources as well as identification and removal of multiple references to the same personalities. This database covers multilateral information about commercial transactions made in Tana in the 13th-15th centuries including places, dates and details of these transactions, detailed information about people involved as well as links to sources of this information.

The Origins of Colonial Investments in Former British and French Africa

Colonial investments impacted long-run political and economic development, but there is little systematic evidence of their origins and spatial distribution. Combining novel data sources, this article shows that colonial investments were very unequally distributed within sixteen British and French African colonies. What led colonial states to invest much more in some districts than others? The author argues that natural harbors and capes led some places to become centers of pre-colonial coastal trade, which in turn increased later colonial investments not only in infrastructure but also in health and education. Furthermore, distance from pre-colonial trading posts helps explain the diffusion of investments within each colony. The author finds limited support for alternative explanations such as natural resources and pre-colonial ethnic characteristics, including pre-colonial political centralization. These two findings suggest an economic origin for the regional and ethnic disparities observed in the colonial and contemporary periods.

INTRODUCTION: POST-GADDAFI REPERCUSSIONS IN THE SAHEL AND WEST AFRICA

The areas south of Libya have experienced more than their fair share of conflict and rapid social change. In earlier times, the main routes of trade, commerce and pilgrimage between West African and the Arab Peninsula passed through this region, also once inhabited by mighty warrior empires (see for example Bawuro 1972). However, as the empires along these routes faded away, and international ocean shipping opened up this part of Africa to the forces of global trade and capitalism, the centres of authority that once controlled this region also vanished. What remained was an almost open territory: unwelcoming and hard, but also a place of possibilities and the freedom to roam for those who had mastered the art of survival under such difficult conditions. This was the land of the Tuareg and other semi-nomadic groups who controlled cities and important trading posts such as Timbuktu, Gao and Kidal in contemporary Mali. This is the world of the Sahel and the parts of Western Africa that straddles Libya, and a region that currently includes Southern Algeria, Northern Mali, Niger, Chad, Mauritania and parts of Northern Nigeria. These are therefore also the countries and areas that have come to experience the full effect of what we define as post-Gaddafi repercussions.

The Portuguese Estado da Índia (Empire in Asia)

The origins of the Portuguese Estado da Índia—the sum of all Portuguese Crown possessions east of the Cape of Good Hope—can be traced back to the late 1400s, most importantly to the inaugural voyage of Vasco da Gama from Lisbon to Calicut (Kozhikode) in 1497–1498. After some initial hesitations, the Portuguese Crown created a governorship for India in 1505, with a seat at Cochin (Kochi) later transferred to Goa, to oversee commercial, military, administrative, and other activities in an increasing number of possessions along the shores of East Africa and Maritime Asia. Portuguese trading posts (feitorias), forts, and fortified towns across the region resulted from conquest or, more frequently, from negotiated agreements with local rulers, on whose cooperation the Portuguese generally relied. The Estado reached its apex in the second half of the 16th century, drawing vast resources from trade around the Cape and within Asian and African waters, while investing increasingly in military and religious campaigns in a variety of regions from southeastern Africa to the Moluccas (Malukus) and Japan. Despite significant losses to the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the English East India Company (EIC) during the 17th century, the Estado survived until the 20th century. Goa became a part of the Indian Union in 1961, and Macao integrated into the People’s Republic of China in 1999. The perceived decadence of the Estado during much of its history is at odds with its longevity and has prompted longstanding debates about the nature of Portuguese power in Asia; its reliance on trade, military might, and imperial ideas; and its intertwinement with Asian polities and societies.

Hansische Niederlassungen in Russland um 1600

Hanseatic Trading Posts in Russia around 1600When Novgorod was absorbed into the Grand Principality of Moscow in 1478, the traditional medieval framework of Hanseatic trade with Russia was transformed. Henceforth, negotiations and decisions on all important questions took place in Moscow, while the day to day problems of trade lay within the purview of the Great Prince’s (later: the Tsar’s) lieutenant residing in Novgorod. Given the abolition of the medieval structures of communication, Hanseatic representatives suddenly required an intimate familiarity with the Russian court in order to conduct successful negotiations. This article argues that the interaction between Hansards and Russians is best understood as a continuing process of accomodation to one another, and focusses initially on the by-laws (Schra) of the Novgorod Kontor, which were continuously amended and supplemented. Initially, these changes were endogenous, resulting from internal tensions within the Hanse itself. Over time, however, the transformation of the Russian environment became more important. Indeed, many of the new rules and regulations inserted into the by-laws can be best understood if they are conceived to be exogenous, imposed on the Kontor from outside. The article then examines in detail the Hanseatic embassy to Moscow in 1603 and demonstrates how the mutual trust between the Hansards and the Tsars arose and how it was strengthened and developed.

From Competition to Conspiracy

For twenty years, the Dutch and English East India Companies cooperated and competed throughout the Indian Ocean in search of dominance in the spice trade. Conflicts over nutmeg and cloves in Banda and the Moluccas were especially deadly for Europeans and non-Europeans alike. The two companies were constrained in their actions in the Indian Ocean by the nations’ historical ties in Europe and by decisions made by their employers, which ultimately forced them into partnership in 1619 in the wake of overt conflict. That new partnership placed the English in a secondary position. A new type of conflict erupted, one centered on conspiracies. To further trust, the companies required traders to live together in shared houses in the clove-trading posts on Ambon, but the scheme backfired and their intimacy was their undoing.

Christian mission in Northern Black Sea region and its geopolitical significance

The spread of Christianity in the Northern Black Sea Region was a continuation of the vector of cultural expansion into this region, outlined in Antiquity and opposing the region’s stable geopolitical ties in the latitudinal direction, with the steppe world of the nomads of Eurasia. The stages of this process were: the Great Greek colonization on Pontus Euxinus; the spread of Pax Romana to the territory of Crimea; the Christianization of the region and the strengthening of Byzantium in the Northern Black Sea Region through an alliance with the Khazaria and the creation of the Klimata-Cherson thema; finally, the emergence of Italian trading posts and the emergence of Genoese Gazaria. The success of the Christian mission of Byzantium would not have been possible without the oncoming movement from the north, which determined the reception of the Byzantine civilization by Rus’-Russia and predefined the geopolitical contours of the modern world. In the opposite direction there was an advance to the south of Rus’ and the formation of the path “from the Varangians to the Greeks”, sea voyages of the Rus’ princes to Constantinople, the capture of Korsun’Cherson by Vladimir the Saint and the baptism of Rus’, the inclusion of Russia in the system of the Byzantine church administration. At the new historical stage, after the fall of Byzantium, the role of the Christian Orthodox empire passed to Russia, and the processes of intercivilizational interaction in the region changed their vector. But even in the new conditions, the meridional dimension remains incomparably more important than the latitudinal dimension: a fact that determines the future geopolitical perspective.