Download or read book Power and Landscape in Atlantic West Africa written by J. Cameron Monroe and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-02-13 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This volume applies insights drawn from the theories and methods of landscape archaeology to contribute to our understanding of the nature if West African societies in the Atlantic Era (17th-19th Centuries AD). The authors adopt a briad set of methods and approaches to tackle how the nature and structures of African political and social relations changed across regions in this period. This is only the second volume in a decade to focus on the archeology of this period in West Africa, and the first volume in sub-Saharan Africanist archeology to be focused in the recent past in oue sub-region of the continent from a coherent methodological and theoretical standpoint"--Provided by publisher.
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 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 incorporates historical, ethnographic, art historical, and archaeological sources to examine the relationship between the production of space and political order in the West African Kingdom of Dahomey during the tumultuous Atlantic Era. Dahomey, situated in the modern Republic of Bénin, emerged in this period as one of the principal agents in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and an exemplar of West African state formation. Drawing from eight years of ethnohistorical and archaeological fieldwork in the Republic of Bénin, the central thesis of this volume is that Dahomean kings used spatial tactics to project power and mitigate dissent across their territories. J. Cameron Monroe argues that these tactics enabled kings to economically exploit their subjects and to promote a sense of the historical and natural inevitability of royal power.
Download or read book Landscapes Sources and Intellectual Projects of the West African Past written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-08-13 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Landscapes, Sources and Intellectual Projects of the West African Past offers a comprehensive assessment of new directions in the historiography of West Africa. With twenty-four chapters by leading researchers in the study of West African history and cultures, the volume examines the main trends in multiple fields including the critical interpretation of Arabic sources; new archaeological surveys of trans-Saharan trade; the discovery of sources in Latin America relating to pan-Atlantic histories; and the continuing analysis of oral histories. The volume is dedicated to Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias, whose work inspired the intellectual reorientations discussed in its chapters and stands as the clearest formulation of the book’s central focus on the relationship between political conjunctures and the production of sources. Contributors are: Benjamin Acloque, Karin Barber, Seydou Camara, Mamadou Diawara, Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias, François-Xavier Fauvelle, Nikolas Gestrich, Toby Green, Bruce Hall, Jan Jansen, Shamil Jeppie, Daouda Keita, Murray Last, Robin Law, Camille Lefebvre, Paul Lovejoy, Ghislaine Lydon, Carlos Magnavita, Sonja Magnavita, Kevin MacDonald, Thomas McCaskie, Ann McDougall, Daniela Moreau, Mauro Nobili, Insa Nolte, Abel-Wedoud Ould-Cheikh, Benedetta Rossi, Charles Stewart.
Download or read book Not Made by Slaves written by Bronwen Everill and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How abolitionist businesses marshaled intense moral outrage over slavery to shape a new ethics of international commerce. “East India Sugar Not Made By Slaves.” With these words on a sugar bowl, consumers of the early nineteenth century declared their power to change the global economy. Bronwen Everill examines how abolitionists from Europe to the United States to West Africa used new ideas of supply and demand, consumer credit, and branding to shape an argument for ethical capitalism. Everill focuses on the everyday economy of the Atlantic world. Antislavery affected business operations, as companies in West Africa, including the British firm Macaulay & Babington and the American partnership of Brown & Ives, developed new tactics in order to make “legitimate” commerce pay. Everill explores how the dilemmas of conducting ethical commerce reshaped the larger moral discourse surrounding production and consumption, influencing how slavery and freedom came to be defined in the market economy. But ethical commerce was not without its ironies; the search for supplies of goods “not made by slaves”—including East India sugar—expanded the reach of colonial empires in the relentless pursuit of cheap but “free” labor. Not Made by Slaves illuminates the early years of global consumer society, while placing the politics of antislavery firmly in the history of capitalism. It is also a stark reminder that the struggle to ensure fair trade and labor conditions continues.
Download or read book Slave Traders by Invitation written by Finn Fuglestad and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-01 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Slave Coast, situated in what is now the West African state of Benin, was the epicentre of the Atlantic Slave Trade. But it was also an inhospitable, surf-ridden coastline, subject to crashing breakers and devoid of permanent human settlement. Nor was it easily accessible from the interior due to a lagoon which ran parallel to the coast. The local inhabitants were not only sheltered against incursions from the sea, but were also locked off from it. Yet, paradoxically, it was this coastline that witnessed a thriving long-term commercial relation-ship between Europeans and Africans, based on the trans-Atlantic slave trade. How did it come about? How was it all organised? And how did the locals react to the opportunities these new trading relations offered them? The Kingdom of Dahomey is usually cited as the Slave Coast's archetypical slave raiding and slave trading polity. An inland realm, it was a latecomer to the slave trade, and simply incorporated a pre-existing system by dint of military prowess, which ultimately was to prove radically counterproductive. Fuglestad's book seeks to explain the Dahomean 'anomaly' and its impact on the Slave Coast's societies and polities.
Download or read book Reluctant Landscapes written by Francois G. Richard and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-09-20 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: West African history is inseparable from the history of the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism. According to historical archaeologist François Richard, however, the dominance of this narrative not only colors the range of political discourse about Africa but also occludes many lesser-known—but equally important—experiences of those living in the region. Reluctant Landscapes is an exploration of the making and remaking of political experience and physical landscapes among rural communities in the Siin province of Senegal between the late 1500s and the onset of World War II. By recovering the histories of farmers and commoners who made up African states’ demographic core in this period, Richard shows their crucial—but often overlooked—role in the making of Siin history. The book also delves into the fraught relation between the Seereer, a minority ethnic and religious group, and the Senegalese nation-state, with Siin’s perceived “primitive” conservatism standing at odds with the country’s Islamic modernity. Through a deep engagement with oral, documentary, archaeological, and ethnographic archives, Richard’s groundbreaking study revisits the four-hundred-year history of a rural community shunted to the margins of Senegal’s national imagination.
Download or read book Imagining Vernacular Histories written by Mobolanle Ebunoluwa Sotunsa and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-08-17 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagining Vernacular Histories is centered on the idea of engaging with indigenous African cosmologies that signal at pluriversality. In conversation with Toyin Falola’s reading of the African pluriverse and his exploration of the idea of “ritual archives,” the contributors to this volume rethink the historical archive in search of vernacular histories. Simultaneously, they recognize the contributions from various other disciplines in pluralizing the term vernacular. The book brings together a wide range of topics, such as reflections on African historiography; the relationship between memory, history and literature; gender relations; and the construction of historical archives. While appropriating Falola’s conception of vernacular histories, the contributors collectively argue that pluriversality and ritual archives can potentially rescue African historical and creative scholarship from the sustained practices of epistemicide. Simultaneously, Imagining Vernacular Histories focuses on the emerging interdisciplinary conversations on constructing the pluriverse as well as on the geopolitics of knowledge production. Through a critical appreciation of Falola’s engagement with the ideas of postcoloniality, decolonizing epistemologies, and pluriversality, this book locates his scholarship in relation to postcolonial theory emerging from the Global South.
Download or read book A History of West Africa written by Toyin Falola and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-12-29 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book introduces readers to the rich and fascinating history of West Africa, stretching all the way back to the stone age, and right up to the modern day. Over the course of twenty seven short and engaging chapters, the book delves into the social, cultural, economic and political history of West Africa, through prehistory, revolutions, ancient empires, thriving trade networks, religious traditions, and then the devastating impact of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and subsequent colonial rule. The book reflects on the struggle for independence and investigates how politics and economics developed in the post-colonial period. By the end of the book, readers will have a detailed understanding of the fascinating and diverse range of cultures to be found in West Africa, and of how the region relates to the rest of the world. Drawing on decades of teaching and research experience, this book will serve as an excellent textbook for entry-level History and African Studies courses, as well as providing a perfect general introduction to anyone interested in finding out about West Africa.
Download or read book Afro European Trade in the Atlantic World written by Silke Strickrodt and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2015 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A uniquely detailed account of the dynamics of Afro-European trade in two states on the western Slave Coast over three centuries and the transition from slave trade to legitimate commerce.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of African Archaeology written by Peter Mitchell and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-07-04 with total page 1361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Africa has the longest and arguably the most diverse archaeological record of any of the continents. It is where the human lineage first evolved and from where Homo sapiens spread across the rest of the world. Later, it witnessed novel experiments in food-production and unique trajectories to urbanism and the organisation of large communities that were not always structured along strictly hierarchical lines. Millennia of engagement with societies in other parts of the world confirm Africa's active participation in the construction of the modern world, while the richness of its history, ethnography, and linguistics provide unusually powerful opportunities for constructing interdisciplinary narratives of Africa's past. This Handbook provides a comprehensive and up-to-date synthesis of African archaeology, covering the entirety of the continent's past from the beginnings of human evolution to the archaeological legacy of European colonialism. As well as covering almost all periods and regions of the continent, it includes a mixture of key methodological and theoretical issues and debates, and situates the subject's contemporary practice within the discipline's history and the infrastructural challenges now facing its practitioners. Bringing together essays on all these themes from over seventy contributors, many of them living and working in Africa, it offers a highly accessible, contemporary account of the subject for use by scholars and students of not only archaeology, but also history, anthropology, and other disciplines.
Download or read book Commercial Cosmopolitanism written by Felicia Gottmann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book showcases the wide variety of commercial cosmopolitan practices that arose from the global economic entanglements of the early modern period. Cosmopolitanism is not only a philosophical ideal: for many centuries it has also been an everyday practice across the globe. The early modern era saw hitherto unprecedented levels of economic interconnectedness. States, societies, and individuals reacted with a mixture of commercial idealism and commercial anxiety, seeking at once to exploit new opportunities for growth whilst limiting its disruptive effects. In highlighting the range of commercial cosmopolitan practices that grew out of early modern globalisation, the book demonstrates that it provided robust alternatives to the universalising western imperial model of the later period. Deploying a number of interdisciplinary methodologies, the kind of ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ that Ulrich Beck has called for, chapters provide agency-centred evaluations of the risks and opportunities inherent in the ambiguous role of the cosmopolitan, who, often playing on and mobilising a number of identities, operated in between and outside of different established legal, social, and cultural systems. The book will be important reading for students and scholars working at the intersection of economic, global, and cultural history.
Download or read book An Archaeology of the English Atlantic World 1600 1700 written by Charles E. Orser, Jr. and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 503 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Archaeology of the British Atlantic World, 1600–1700 is the first book to apply the methods of modern-world archaeology to the study of the seventeenth-century English colonial world. Charles E. Orser, Jr explores a range of material evidence of daily life collected from archaeological excavations throughout the Atlantic region, including England, Ireland, western Africa, Native North America, and the eastern United States. He considers the archaeological record together with primary texts by contemporary writers. Giving particular attention to housing, fortifications, delftware, and stoneware, Orser offers new interpretations for each type of artefact. His study demonstrates how the archaeological record expands our understanding of the Atlantic world at a critical moment of its expansion, as well as to the development of the modern, Western world.
Download or read book The Archaeology of Slavery written by Lydia Wilson Marshall and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Archaeology of Slavery grapples with both the benefits and complications of a comparative approach to the archaeology of slavery. Contributors from different archaeological subfields, including American, African, prehistoric, and historical, consider how to define slavery, identify it in the archaeological record, and study slavery as a diachronic process that covers enslavement to emancipation and beyond. Themes include how to define slavery, how to identify slavery archaeologically, enslavement and emancipation, and the politics and ethics of slavery-related research.
Download or read book African Civilizations written by Graham Connah and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new revised edition offers expanded coverage, new illustrations and an extended new list of references.
Download or read book Theory in Africa Africa in Theory written by Stephanie Wynne-Jones and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-06-19 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theory in Africa, Africa in Theory explores the place of Africa in archaeological theory, and the place of theory in African archaeology. The centrality of Africa to global archaeological thinking is highlighted, with a particular focus on materiality and agency in contemporary interpretation. As a means to explore the nature of theory itself, the volume also addresses differences between how African models are used in western theoretical discourse and the use of that theory within Africa. Providing a key contribution to theoretical discourse through a focus on the context of theory-building, this volume explores how African modes of thought have shaped our approaches to a meaningful past outside of Africa. A timely intervention into archaeological thought, Theory in Africa, Africa in Theory deconstructs the conventional ways we approach the past, positioning the continent within a global theoretical discourse and blending Western and African scholarship. This volume will be a valuable resource for those interested in the archaeology of Africa, as well as providing fresh perspectives to those interested in archaeological theory more generally.
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Global Historical Archaeology written by Charles E. Orser, Jr. and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-07-26 with total page 1077 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Global Historical Archaeology is a multi-authored compendium of articles on specific topics of interest to today’s historical archaeologists, offering perspectives on the current state of research and collectively outlining future directions for the field. The broad range of topics covered in this volume allows for specificity within individual chapters, while building to a cumulative overview of the field of historical archaeology as it stands, and where it could go next. Archaeological research is discussed in the context of current sociological concerns, different approaches and techniques are assessed, and potential advances are posited. This is a comprehensive treatment of the sub-discipline, engaging key contemporary debates, and providing a series of specially-commissioned geographical overviews to complement the more theoretical explorations. This book is designed to offer a starting point for students who may wish to pursue particular topics in more depth, as well as for non-archaeologists who have an interest in historical archaeology. Archaeologists, historians, preservationists, and all scholars interested in the role historical archaeology plays in illuminating daily life during the past five centuries will find this volume engaging and enlightening.
