Akin Ogundiran: The Historian and Archaeologist of Yoruba-Atlantic becomes Chancellor Professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte

I am pleased to share the good news that Professor Akin Ogundiran has been named Chancellor’s Professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. This distinguished title is a university-wide honor reserved for a full professor who has attained outstanding scholarly achievement in a professional field, and excelled in interdisciplinary research, teaching, and service in more than one department or college. He is the third professor in the university’s history to attain this distinguished rank—https://provost.uncc.edu/news/2019-10-28/ogundiran-receives-chancellors-professordesignation Professor Ogundiran has always been as exceptional as he was promising. He was a graduate of Obafemi Awolowo University where he bagged BA in Archaeology (First Class Honors) in 1988. This is where and when our interactions began, and that was where we sensed he was a student who would be greater than his teachers. We are proud of him, as one of the best students produced by Ife. He earned his M.Sc. in archaeology from the University of Ibadan in 1990. Ten years later, he received his doctorate in archaeology from Boston University. Within eight years, he became a professor of History and a major pillar in African Studies. In my book, The African Diaspora: Slavery, Modernity and Globalization, I devoted Chapter 10 to his oeuvre, stating in one of the key paragraphs that: 268 Toyin Falola In connecting West Africa to the Atlantic economy, Ogundiran is pointing to what could be characterized as the metabolic rift between supply and demand; African economies were on the supply side of the global division of labor that compelled them to produce for the Atlantic economy and, at the same time, to consume products from external sources. This division of labor, and the productive mechanism unleashed by the demand side, ultimately had implications for all aspects of institutions. Ogundiran has to grapple not only with the meaning of local history, but also with the definition of the world in which the local is situated against the background of rapidly changing events. And if, as he treats the local, he engages in issues around production and trade—as all his objects indicate—he is forced to engage in the understanding of how society relates to nature: that is, how humans ultimately relate to their environments, using and destroying them at the same time, and sometimes renewing them as well.

Sole Traders? The Role of the Extended Family in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Business Networks

Despite significant developments in understanding the role of women in early-modern business, more is needed to fully understand women’s impact on eighteenth-century trading networks. Further, much less is known about the role of wider family members, especially children, in the eighteenth-century Atlantic economy. The formal documentation that is privileged in business histories does not tell the whole story, and it frequently represents mercantile activity as a pursuit dominated by a patriarch at the center of a trading network. This article explores eighteenth-century familial commercial networks through extensive use of the personal family correspondence of three merchant families who lived and traded within different locales of the northern Atlantic: Hugh Hall, a merchant and vice judge of the admiralty in Barbados; the Black family, who were wine merchants in Bordeaux; and Joseph Symson, a mercer and shopkeeper from Kendal, England. This article will show that women appear as autonomous players with the power and ability to make informed and independent decisions that directed the business interests of their families. Moreover, it includes an assessment of the ways in which merchants cultivated the expertise of their extended families to enhance their commercial networks and advance their business pursuits. Focusing on children who supported or enhanced the prosperity of the family firm, this article emphasizes that their participation was intentional, not incidental. This article asks questions about the emotional consequences of such activity—which have rarely been considered in any detail—as well as the financial benefit of operating in this manner.

The End Comes to Byzantium

This chapter examines how the Byzantine Empire crested and began to fade under the rule of Basil II. When Byzantium lost wars, the emperor had to find some other way to pay for military and governmental expenses. Basil's innovation was to give the nobles tax relief rather than direct payment. He also got them to fight “for free” by letting them take land from smaller peasants. Increasing the size of nobles' estates increased the power of regional aristocrats. This gave them independent power bases, which increased their capacity to hold back resources from future wars — or to try to take over the empire for themselves. Civil wars and regional uprisings flourished. A particularly nasty civil war between 1341 and 1354 gutted Byzantium's military strength and led to gains by the Serbs, the Venetians, and the Genoese. While Constantinople did not disappear entirely, Byzantium did. Byzantium went from being a center of power, wealth, and culture to being a subordinate outpost of an Atlantic economy.

Long-Distance Trade from the Voyages of Discovery to the First World War, 1500–1914

The highly integrated world economy at the outbreak of World War I emerged from discoveries and technological change in previous centuries. Territories unknown to the economy of Eurasia offered profitable opportunities if capital and labor could be mobilized to cheaply produce products that could bear the high cost of transportation that prevailed before industrialization. In the 16th century, American monetary metals mined using European technology and local labor, and sold worldwide, had major repercussions, including increasing trade between Europe and Asia. From the mid-17th century, sugar and tobacco in the Americas, developed on the backs of imported African slaves, produced an Atlantic economy that included the mainland colonies of British America. In the 19th century, technological innovation became the main driving force. First, it cheapened textile production in Britain and creating a massive demand for raw cotton. Then technology radically reduced the cost of transportation on both land and sea. Lower transportation costs spurred greater international specialization and, equally importantly, brought frontiers in continental interiors into the world economy. During the later 19th century, commercial and financial institutions arose that supported increased global economic integration.