Download or read book Dahomey as It Is written by J. A. Skertchly and published by Literary Licensing, LLC. This book was released on 2014-03 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Is A New Release Of The Original 1874 Edition.
Download or read book Amazons of Black Sparta 2nd Edition written by Stanley B. Alpern and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2011-04-11 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The only thoroughly documented Amazons in world history are the women warriors of Dahomey, an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western African kingdom. Once dubbed a 'small black Sparta,' residents of Dahomey shared with the Spartans an intense militarism and sense of collectivism. Updated with a new preface by the author, Amazons of Black Sparta is the product of meticulous archival research and Alpern's gift for narrative. It will stand as the most comprehensive and accessible account of the woman warriors of Dahomey.
Download or read book Dahomey and the Slave Trade written by Polanyi Karl and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The death of Karl Polanyi in 1964, at seventy-seven, curtailed a productive life in the fields economic history and economic anthropology. Some of his students-impressed with his erudition and disregard for the ordinary-described him as "otherworldly". He was founder of the Galilei Society in Budapest, the cradle of the liberal revolutions in Hungary in the first decades of the 20th. century. In the first World War, he was a cavalry officer and after that war he went to Vienna. There he became a columnist and commentator for the Oesterreichische Volkswirt, in charge of analysis of international affairs. For years he read daily The Times, Le Temps, the Frankfurter Zeitung, all the Vienna papers and those from Budapest and others as they were relevant. He emigrated to England where he became a tutor for Oxford University and the University of London and wrote re-analysis of English economic history: The Great Transformation. After World War II, Polanyi came to Columbia University to teach economic history. His courses were always popular and well attended. During his last years at Columbia, and during his early years of retirement, Polanyi was joined by Conrad Arensberg in heading a large interdisciplinary project for the comparative study of economic systems. The volume that resulted was Trade and Market in the Early Empires, a landmark in economic anthropology and economic history. Polanyi's interest in Dahomey stems from one of his students who had contributed two papers on Dahomey to Trade and Market. Polanyi grew interested and, with characteristic thoroughness, read the literature on that West African kingdom. The present book resulted from these last years of productive scholarship. Dahomey and the Slave Trade was prepared for the press by his widow, Ilona Duczynska Polanyi. Foreword vii This book is of vital importance to anthropology for several reasons, the most compelling being that the concerns of history and of anthropology are overlapped in it. Besides making available the economic history of one of the great West African kingdoms, it sets forth some new theory for economic anthropology-particularly Part III, in which Polanyi makes sense of the intricacies of trade between a people with a fully monetized economy, and one without, and those passages in which he adds "house-holding" as a concept to his ideas about the principles of economic integration. Polanyi's position in economic anthropology-not to mention the status he achieved as economic historian, translator of Hungarian literature, man of action, and inspiring teacher-is secure. He has enabled anthropologists to focus their studies of economy on processes of allocation rather than on processes of production, thereby bringing the studies into line with economic theory without merely "applying" economic theory to systems it was not designed to explain. The "release" that resulted from this great stride forward can be compared, for economic anthropology and studies in comparative economics, with the importance of the discovery in the late nineteenth century of the price mechanism itself. The more we know about the workings of other, and strange, economies, the more we can know of our own. Polanyi's work will stand as a major source of comparative insight-the core of anthropological purpose.
Download or read book The Precolonial State in West Africa written by J. Cameron Monroe and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-06-09 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines political life in the Kingdom of Dahomey, located in the Republic of Bénin.
Download or read book The Gods of Dahomey written by Teejay LeCapois and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2012-04-11 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Samira Diallo is a young woman living in Greenwich, Connecticut, where she studies at Cadmus College. As the only African-American gal on the swim team, Samira wows them with her prowess. Opposing her is her rival Lynn Wellington, the blonde queen of the swim team. Lynn sets out to expose Samira, and discovers that she's much more than she seems. As it turns out, Samira has extraordinary powers, and was once one of the Gods and Goddesses of Dahomey ( present-day Benin ). The Gods of West Africa are back, and they've definitely got major plans for the beautiful, wayward Samira, and the rest of Mankind. Opposing the West African Gods are their ancient enemies, the Primordial Ones, and their mortal agents. Will the modern world survive this Divine conflict ?
Download or read book Wives of the Leopard written by Edna G. Bay and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2012-06-29 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wives of the Leopard explores power and culture in a pre-colonial West African state whose army of women and practice of human sacrifice earned it notoriety in the racist imagination of late nineteenth-century Europe and America. Tracing two hundred years of the history of Dahomey up to the French colonial conquest in 1894, the book follows change in two central institutions. One was the monarchy, the coalitions of men and women who seized and wielded power in the name of the king. The second was the palace, a household of several thousand wives of the king who supported and managed state functions. Looking at Dahomey against the backdrop of the Atlantic slave trade and the growth of European imperialism, Edan G. Bay reaches for a distinctly Dahomean perspective as she weaves together evidence drawn from travelers' memoirs and local oral accounts, from the religious practices of vodun, and from ethnographic studies of the twentieth century. Wives of the Leopard thoroughly integrates gender into the political analysis of state systems, effectively creating a social history of power. More broadly, it argues that women as a whole and men of the lower classes were gradually squeezed out of access to power as economic resources contracted with the decline of the slave trade in the nineteenth century. In these and other ways, the book provides an accessible portrait of Dahomey's complex and fascinating culture without exoticizing it.
Download or read book Warrior Women written by Robert Edgerton and published by Westview Press. This book was released on 2000-06-22 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When looking for historical examples of women who have fought as soldiers, one can refer--with disappointment--to the words of John Keegan, one of the world's most well-known military historians: "Women look to men to protect them from danger, and bitterly reproach them when they fail as defenders...Women do not fight."In this book, anthropologist and historian Robert Edgerton disagrees, taking as his centerpiece the women warriors of Dahomey, a West African kingdom that reached its heyday during the height of the African slave trade. In this land (now the Republic of Benin), women eventually became the elite force of the kingdom's standing army, the prime fighting force faced by the French when they defeated and colonized the region in the 1890s. This book is both a narrative history of these women and their role in Dahomian society as well as a more far-ranging refutation of the argument that warfare has always been a club "for men only."
Download or read book Slavery Colonialism and Economic Growth in Dahomey 1640 1960 written by Patrick Manning and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-06-07 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book integrates into a single framework Dahomey's pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial economic history.
Download or read book Africa s Development in Historical Perspective written by Emmanuel Akyeampong and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-08-11 with total page 541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why has Africa remained persistently poor over its recorded history? Has Africa always been poor? What has been the nature of Africa's poverty and how do we explain its origins? This volume takes a necessary interdisciplinary approach to these questions by bringing together perspectives from archaeology, linguistics, history, anthropology, political science, and economics. Several contributors note that Africa's development was at par with many areas of Europe in the first millennium of the Common Era. Why Africa fell behind is a key theme in this volume, with insights that should inform Africa's developmental strategies.
Download or read book Commercial Transitions and Abolition in West Africa 1630 1860 written by Angus E. Dalrymple-Smith and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-12-09 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Commercial Transitions and Abolition in West Africa 1630–1860 offers a fresh perspective on why, in the nineteenth century, the most important West African states and merchants who traded with Atlantic markets became exporters of commodities, instead of exporters of slaves. This study takes a long-term comparative approach and makes of use of new quantitative data. It argues that the timing and nature of the change from slave exports to so-called ‘legitimate commerce’ in the Gold Coast, the Bight of Biafra and the Bight of Benin, can be predicted by patterns of trade established in previous centuries by a range of African and European actors responding to the changing political and economic environments of the Atlantic world.
Download or read book Asen Ancestors and Vodun written by Edna G. Bay and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A social and iconographic history of a West African sculptural form
Download or read book The Viceroy of Ouidah written by Bruce Chatwin and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1988-06-07 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bruce Chatwin’s debut novel: “Conrad’s Heart of Darkness seen through a microscope” (The Atlantic) In this vivid, powerful novel, Chatwin tells of Francisco Manoel de Silva, a poor Brazilian adventurer who sails to Dahomey in West Africa to trade for slaves and amass his fortune. His plans exceed his dreams, and soon he is the Viceroy of Ouidah, master of all slave trading in Dahomey. But the ghastly business of slave trading and the open savagery of life in Dahomey slowly consume Manoel's wealth and sanity.
Download or read book Abson Company written by Stanley Alpern and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-15 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yorkshireman Lionel Abson was the longest surviving European stationed in West Africa in the eighteenth century. He reached William's Fort at Ouidah on the Slave Coast as a trader in 1767, took over the English fort in 1770, and remained in charge until his death in 1803. He avoided the 'white man's grave' for thirty-six years. Along the way he had three sons with an African woman, the eldest partly schooled in England, and a bright daughter named Sally. When Abson died, royal lackeys kidnapped his children. Sally was placed in the king's harem and pined away; her brothers vanished. That king became so unpopular as a result that the people of Dahomey disowned him. Abson also mastered the local language and became an historian. After only two years as fort chief, he was part of the king's delegation to make peace with an enemy, a unique event in centuries of Dahomean history. This singular book recounts the remarkable life of this key figure in an ignominious period of European and African history, offering a microcosm of the lives of Europeans in eighteenth-century West Africa, and their relationships with and attitudes towards those they met there.
Download or read book In Dahomey written by Jesse A Shipp and published by Literary Licensing, LLC. This book was released on 2014-08-07 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Is A New Release Of The Original 1902 Edition.
Download or read book Christian Churches in Dahomey Benin written by Patrick Claffey and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2007 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Republic of Benin struggles to find its way into socio-political modernity. The Christian churches have played various roles in this struggle. This book is an account of both the historical difficulties of state formation and the role the Churches have played in this process.
Download or read book Ouidah written by Robin Law and published by Ohio State University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ouidah, an indigenous African town in the modern Republic of Benin, was the principal pre-colonial commercial centre of its region, and the second most important town of the Dahomey kingdom. It served as a major outlet for the export of slaves for the trans- Atlantic trade. Between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries Ouidah was the most important embarkation point for slaves in the region of West Africa known to outsiders as the 'Slave Coast'. Exporting over a million slaves, it was second only to Luanda in Angola for the embarkation of slaves in the whole of Africa. The author's central concerns are the organization of the African end of the slave trade, and the impact participation in the trade had on the historical development of the African societies involved. It shifts the focus from the viewpoint of the Dahomian monarchy, represented in previous studies, to the coast. Here is a well documented case study of pre-colonial urbanism, of the evolution of a merchant community, and in particular the growth of a group of private traders whose relations with the Dahomian monarchy grew increasingly problematic over time. North America: Ohio U Press
Download or read book Barracoon written by Zora Neale Hurston and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the New York Times' Most Memorable Literary Moments of the Last 25 Years! • New York Times Bestseller • TIME Magazine’s Best Nonfiction Book of 2018 • New York Public Library’s Best Book of 2018 • NPR’s Book Concierge Best Book of 2018 • Economist Book of the Year • SELF.com’s Best Books of 2018 • Audible’s Best of the Year • BookRiot’s Best Audio Books of 2018 • The Atlantic’s Books Briefing: History, Reconsidered • Atlanta Journal Constitution, Best Southern Books 2018 • The Christian Science Monitor’s Best Books 2018 • “A profound impact on Hurston’s literary legacy.”—New York Times “One of the greatest writers of our time.”—Toni Morrison “Zora Neale Hurston’s genius has once again produced a Maestrapiece.”—Alice Walker A major literary event: a newly published work from the author of the American classic Their Eyes Were Watching God, with a foreword from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker, brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story of one of the last-known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade—abducted from Africa on the last "Black Cargo" ship to arrive in the United States. In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation’s history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo’s firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States. In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, the African-centric community three miles from Mobile founded by Cudjo and other former slaves from his ship. Spending more than three months there, she talked in depth with Cudjo about the details of his life. During those weeks, the young writer and the elderly formerly enslaved man ate peaches and watermelon that grew in the backyard and talked about Cudjo’s past—memories from his childhood in Africa, the horrors of being captured and held in a barracoon for selection by American slavers, the harrowing experience of the Middle Passage packed with more than 100 other souls aboard the Clotilda, and the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War. Based on those interviews, featuring Cudjo’s unique vernacular, and written from Hurston’s perspective with the compassion and singular style that have made her one of the preeminent American authors of the twentieth-century, Barracoon masterfully illustrates the tragedy of slavery and of one life forever defined by it. Offering insight into the pernicious legacy that continues to haunt us all, black and white, this poignant and powerful work is an invaluable contribution to our shared history and culture.
