The Children of Africa in the Colonies
The Children of Africa in the Colonies

Author: Melanie J. Newton

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2008-06-01

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 0807148725

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

How emancipation transformed social and political relations in Barbados When a small group of free men of color gathered in 1838 to celebrate the end of apprenticeship in Barbados, they spoke of emancipation as the moment of freedom for all colored people, not just the former slaves. The fact that many of these men had owned slaves themselves gives a hollow ring to their lofty pronouncements. Yet in The Children of Africa in the Colonies, Melanie J. Newton demonstrates that simply dismissing these men as hypocrites ignores the complexity of their relationship to slavery. Exploring the role of free blacks in Barbados from 1790 to 1860, Newton argues that the emancipation process transformed social relations between Afro-Barbadians and slaves and ex-slaves. Free people of color in Barbados genuinely wanted slavery to end, Newton explains, a desire motivated in part by the realization that emancipation offered them significant political advantages. As a result, free people's goals for the civil rights struggle that began in Barbados in the 1790s often diverged from those of the slaves, and the tensions that formed along class, education, and gender lines severely weakened the movement. While the populist masses viewed emancipation as an opportunity to form a united community among all people of color, wealthy free people viewed it as a chance to better their position relative to white Europeans. To this end, free people of color refashioned their identities in relationship to Africa. Prior to the 1820s, Newton reveals, they downplayed their African descent, emphasizing instead their legal status as free people and their position as owners of property, including slaves. As the emancipation debate in the Atlantic world reached its zenith in the 1820s and 1830s and whites grew increasingly hostile and inflexible, elite free people allied themselves with the politics of the working class and the slaves, relying for the first time on their African heritage and the association of their skin color with slavery to openly challenge white supremacy. After emancipation, free people of color again redefined themselves, now as loyal British imperial subjects, casting themselves in the role of political protectors of their ex-slave brethren in an attempt to escape social and political disenfranchisement. While some wealthy men of color gained political influence as a result of emancipation, the absence of fundamental change in the distribution of land and wealth left most men and women of color with little hope of political independence or social mobility. Mining a rich vein of primary and secondary sources, Newton's study elegantly describes how class divisions and disagreements over labor and social policy among free and slave black Barbadians led to political unrest and devastated the hope for an entirely new social structure and a plebeian majority in the British Caribbean.

Empire's Children
Empire's Children

Author: Emmanuelle Saada

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2012-03-02

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 0226733076

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Operating at the intersection of history, anthropology, and law, this book reveals the unacknowledged but central role of race in the definition of French nationality. The author weaves together the perspectives of jurists, colonial officials, and more, and demonstrates why the French Empire cannot be analyzed in black-and-white terms.

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Author: Walter Rodney

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2018-11-27

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 1788731204

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

“A call to arms in the class struggle for racial equity”—the hugely influential work of political theory and history, now powerfully introduced by Angela Davis (Los Angeles Review of Books). This legendary classic on European colonialism in Africa stands alongside C.L.R. James’ Black Jacobins, Eric Williams’ Capitalism & Slavery, and W.E.B. Dubois’ Black Reconstruction. In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, South America, the African continent, and the Caribbean. In each locale, Rodney found himself a lightning rod for working class Black Power. His deportation catalyzed 20th century Jamaica's most significant rebellion, the 1968 Rodney riots, and his scholarship trained a generation how to think politics at an international scale. In 1980, shortly after founding of the Working People's Alliance in Guyana, the 38-year-old Rodney would be assassinated. In his magnum opus, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Rodney incisively argues that grasping "the great divergence" between the west and the rest can only be explained as the exploitation of the latter by the former. This meticulously researched analysis of the abiding repercussions of European colonialism on the continent of Africa has not only informed decades of scholarship and activism, it remains an indispensable study for grasping global inequality today.

Education and Empire
Education and Empire

Author: Rebecca Swartz

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-01-09

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 3319959093

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book tracks the changes in government involvement in Indigneous children’s education over the nineteenth century, drawing on case studies from the Caribbean, Australia and South Africa. Schools were pivotal in the production and reproduction of racial difference in the colonies of settlement. Between 1833 and 1880, there were remarkable changes in thinking about education in Britain and the Empire with it increasingly seen as a government responsibility. At the same time, children’s needs came to be seen as different to those of their parents, and childhood was approached as a time to make interventions into Indigenous people’s lives. This period also saw shifts in thinking about race. Members of the public, researchers, missionaries and governments discussed the function of education, considering whether it could be used to further humanitarian or settler colonial aims. Underlying these questions were anxieties regarding the status of Indigenous people in newly colonised territories: the successful education of their children could show their potential for equality.

African History: A Very Short Introduction
African History: A Very Short Introduction

Author: John Parker

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2007-03-22

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 0192802488

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Intended for those interested in the African continent and the diversity of human history, this work looks at Africa's past and reflects on the changing ways it has been imagined and represented. It illustrates key themes in modern thinking about Africa's history with a range of historical examples.

African Urban Experiences in Colonial Zimbabwe
African Urban Experiences in Colonial Zimbabwe

Author: Tsuneo Yoshikuni

Publisher: African Books Collective

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 1779220545

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Before 'Harare' replaced 'Salisbury' as Zimbabwe's capital city in 1982, the name belonged to the country's first black township, now called Mbare. How and when did the township come into being? In this pioneering study, Tsuneo Yoshikuni offers a fascinating social history of urban development in the early twentieth century.

The Retornados from the Portuguese Colonies in Africa
The Retornados from the Portuguese Colonies in Africa

Author: Elsa Peralta

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-09-09

Total Pages: 421

ISBN-13: 100044063X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Placed in the wider scope of post-war European decolonisation migrations, The Retornados from the Portuguese Colonies in Africa looks at the "Return" of the Portuguese nationals living in the African colonies when they became independent. Using an interdisciplinary research agenda, the book presents a collection of research essays written by experts in the fields of anthropology, history, literature and the arts, that look at a wide range of memory narratives through which the Return—as well as the experiences of war, violence, loss and trauma—have been expressed, contested and internalised in the social realm. These narratives include testimonial accounts from the so-called retornados from Africa and their descendants, as well as works of fiction and public memory—novels, television series, artworks, films or social media—that have come to mediate the public understanding of this past. Through the dialogue between these different narrative modes, this book intends to explore the interplay between official memory, the lived experience and fiction, thus contributing to build an empirical basis to critically discuss the memory of the end of the Portuguese empire within postcolonial Europe. This book will be of great interest to postgraduates, researchers and academics, most notably the ones working in the fields of postcolonial studies, cultural studies and memory studies.

State-Building and Multilingual Education in Africa
State-Building and Multilingual Education in Africa

Author: Ericka A. Albaugh

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-04-24

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1139916777

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

How do governments in Africa make decisions about language? What does language have to do with state-building, and what impact might it have on democracy? This manuscript provides a longue durée explanation for policies toward language in Africa, taking the reader through colonial, independence, and contemporary periods. It explains the growing trend toward the use of multiple languages in education as a result of new opportunities and incentives. The opportunities incorporate ideational relationships with former colonizers as well as the work of language NGOs on the ground. The incentives relate to the current requirements of democratic institutions, and the strategies leaders devise to win elections within these constraints. By contrasting the environment faced by African leaders with that faced by European state-builders, it explains the weakness of education and limited spread of standard languages on the continent. The work combines constructivist understanding about changing preferences with realist insights about the strategies leaders employ to maintain power.

New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America
New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America

Author: Wendy Warren

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2016-06-07

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 1631492152

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History A New York Times Notable Book A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection A Providence Journal Best Book of the Year Winner of the Organization of American Historians Merle Curti Award for Social History Finalist for the Harriet Tubman Prize Finalist for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize "This book is an original achievement, the kind of history that chastens our historical memory as it makes us wiser." —David W. Blight, author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Widely hailed as a “powerfully written” history about America’s beginnings (Annette Gordon-Reed), New England Bound fundamentally changes the story of America’s seventeenth-century origins. Building on the works of giants like Bernard Bailyn and Edmund S. Morgan, Wendy Warren has not only “mastered that scholarship” but has now rendered it in “an original way, and deepened the story” (New York Times Book Review). While earlier histories of slavery largely confine themselves to the South, Warren’s “panoptical exploration” (Christian Science Monitor) links the growth of the northern colonies to the slave trade and examines the complicity of New England’s leading families, demonstrating how the region’s economy derived its vitality from the slave trading ships coursing through its ports. And even while New England Bound explains the way in which the Atlantic slave trade drove the colonization of New England, it also brings to light, in many cases for the first time ever, the lives of the thousands of reluctant Indian and African slaves who found themselves forced into the project of building that city on a hill. We encounter enslaved Africans working side jobs as con artists, enslaved Indians who protested their banishment to sugar islands, enslaved Africans who set fire to their owners’ homes and goods, and enslaved Africans who saved their owners’ lives. In Warren’s meticulous, compelling, and hard-won recovery of such forgotten lives, the true variety of chattel slavery in the Americas comes to light, and New England Bound becomes the new standard for understanding colonial America.