Download or read book The Kingdom of Allada written by Robin Law and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 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 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 Dahomey an Ancient West African Kingdom written by Melville Jean Herskovits and published by . This book was released on 1967 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Indigenous African Institutions written by George Ayittey and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2006-09-01 with total page 600 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Ayittey’s Indigenous African Institutions presents a detailed and convincing picture of pre-colonial and post-colonial Africa - its cultures, traditions, and indigenous institutions, including participatory democracy.
Download or read book Warfare in Atlantic Africa 1500 1800 written by John K. Thornton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 1999-08-26 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500-1800 investigates the impact of warfare on the history of Africa in the period of the slave trade and the founding of empires. It includes the discussion of: : * the relationship between war and the slave trade * the role of Europeans in promoting African wars and supplying African armies * the influence of climatic and ecological factors on warfare patterns and dynamics * the impact of social organization and military technology, including the gunpowder revolution * case studies of warfare in Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, Benin and West Central Africa
Download or read book Palace Sculptures of Abomey written by Francesca Piqué and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2000-03-16 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Republic of Benin in West Africa is home to more than forty ethnic groups, the largest of which is the Fon. In the early seventeenth century, the Fon established a society ruled by a dynasty of kings, who over the years forged the powerful kingdom of Dahomey. In their capital city of Abomey, they built a remarkable complex of palaces that became the center of the kingdom's political, social, and religious life. The palace walls were decorated with colorful low-relief sculptures, or bas-reliefs, which recount legends and battles and glorify the history of the dynasty's reign. Over the centuries, these visual stories have represented and perpetuated the history and myths of the Fon people. The Palace Sculptures of Abomey combines lavish color photographs of the bas-reliefs with a lively history of the Dahomey kingdom, complemented by period drawings, rare historical photographs, and colorful textile art. The book provides a vivid portrait of these exceptional narrative sculptures and the equally remarkable people who crafted them. Also included are a reading of the stories on the walls and details of the four-year collaboration between the Benin Ministry of Culture and Communications and the Getty Conservation Institute to conserve the bas-reliefs of Abomey. Final chapters describe the Historic Museum of Abomey, now housed in the palace complex, and discuss the continuing popularity of bas-reliefs in contemporary West African art.
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.
Download or read book A Mission to Gelele King of Dahome written by Sir Richard Francis Burton and published by . This book was released on 1864 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 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 The Women Soldiers of Dahomey written by Sylvia Serbin and published by United Nations Education, Scientific & Cultural Organization. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elite troops of women soldiers contributed to the military power of the Kingdom of Dahomey in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Admired in their country and feared by their adversaries, these formidable warriors never fled from danger. The troops were dissolved after the fall of Behanzin (Gbehanzin), the last King of Dahomey, during French colonial expansion at the end of the nineteenth century.
Download or read book A Transatlantic History of Haitian Vodou written by Benjamin Hebblethwaite and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2021-09-30 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Connecting four centuries of political, social, and religious history with fieldwork and language documentation, A Transatlantic History of Haitian Vodou analyzes Haitian Vodou’s African origins, transmission to Saint-Domingue, and promulgation through song in contemporary Haiti. Split into two sections, the African chapters focus on history, economics, and culture in Dahomey, Allada, and Hueda while scrutinizing the role of Europeans in fomenting tensions. The political, military, and slave trading histories of the kingdoms in the Bight of Benin reveal the circumstances of enslavement, including the geographies, ethnicities, languages, and cultures of enslavers and enslaved. The study of the spirits, rituals, structure, and music of the region’s religions sheds light on important sources for Haitian Vodou. Having royal, public, and private expressions, Vodun spirit-based traditions served as cultural systems that supported or contested power and enslavement. At once suppliers and victims of the European slave trade, the people of Dahomey, Allada, and Hueda deeply shaped the emergence of Haiti’s creolized culture. The Haitian chapters focus on Vodou’s Rada Rite (from Allada) and Gede Rite (from Abomey) through the songs of Rasin Figuier’s Vodou Lakay and Rasin Bwa Kayiman’s Guede, legendary rasin compact discs released on Jean Altidor’s Miami label, Mass Konpa Records. All the Vodou songs on the discs are analyzed with a method dubbed “Vodou hermeneutics” that harnesses history, religious studies, linguistics, literary criticism, and ethnomusicology in order to advance a scholarly approach to Vodou songs.
Download or read book The Slave Coast of West Africa 1550 1750 written by Robin Law and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book studies the impact of the Atlantic slave trade on the 'Slave Coast' of West Africa, an area covering modern south-eastern Ghana, Togo, Benin, and south-western Nigeria. This region was one of the most important sources of slaves for the Atlantic slave trade, and its history providesan exceptionally well-documented illustration of the effect of the trade on the indigenous African societies involved in it. The expansion of slave exports during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries coincided with a period of political disorder, which ended with the rise of the newkingdom of Dahomey. Dahomey was a more militarized and more politically centralized state than those which preceded it in the region, and its distinctive character reflected the impact of the slave trade. This is the first detailed study of the early history of the Slave Coast for over twenty years. Robin Law examines the events which preceded the rise of Dahomey, the organization of the slave trade and its impact on the domestic economy, and the social and political structures of Dahomey and itspredecessors. This is a meticulously researched, lucid, and scholarly analysis which makes an important contribution to the history of both early modern European expansion and pre-colonial West Africa.
Download or read book Africans to Spanish America written by Sherwin K. Bryant and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2012-02-15 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Africans to Spanish America expands the Diaspora framework that has shaped much of the recent scholarship on Africans in the Americas to include Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, and Cuba, exploring the connections and disjunctures between colonial Latin America and the African Diaspora in the Spanish empires. While a majority of the research on the colonial Diaspora focuses on the Caribbean and Brazil, analysis of the regions of Mexico and the Andes opens up new questions of community formation that incorporated Spanish legal strategies in secular and ecclesiastical institutions as well as articulations of multiple African identities. Editors Sherwin K. Bryant, Rachel Sarah O'Toole, and Ben Vinson III arrange the volume around three themes: identity construction in the Americas; the struggle by enslaved and free people to present themselves as civilized, Christian, and resistant to slavery; and issues of cultural exclusion and inclusion. Across these broad themes, contributors offer probing and detailed studies of the place and roles of people of African descent in the complex realities of colonial Spanish America. Contributors are Joan C. Bristol, Nancy E. van Deusen, Leo J. Garofalo, Herbert S. Klein, Charles Beatty-Medina, Karen Y. Morrison, Rachel Sarah O'Toole, Frank "Trey" Proctor III, and Michele Reid-Vazquez.
Download or read book The Yoruba from Prehistory to the Present written by Aribidesi Usman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-04 with total page 519 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rich and accessible account of Yoruba history, society and culture from the pre-colonial period to the present.
