The Impoverishment of the African Red Sea Littoral, 1640–1945
The Impoverishment of the African Red Sea Littoral, 1640–1945

Author: Steven Serels

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-08-23

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 3319941658

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The African Red Sea Littoral, currently divided between Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Djibouti, is one of the poorest regions in the world. But the pastoralist communities indigenous to this region were not always poor—historically, they had access to a variety of resources that allowed them to prosper in the harsh, arid environment. This access was mediated by a robust moral economy of pastoralism that acted as a social safety net. Steven Serels charts the erosion of this moral economy, a slow-moving process that began during the Little Ice Age mega-drought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and continued through the devastating famines of the twentieth century. By examining mass sedentarization after the Second World War as merely the latest manifestation of an inter-generational environmental and economic crisis, this book offers an innovative lens for understanding poverty in northeastern Africa.

Cargoes in Motion
Cargoes in Motion

Author: Burkhard Schnepel

Publisher: Ohio University Press

Published: 2022-02-08

Total Pages: 387

ISBN-13: 0821447475

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An innovative collection of essays that foregrounds specific cargoes as a means to understand connectivity and mobility across the Indian Ocean world. Scholars have long appreciated the centrality of trade and commerce in understanding the connectivity and mobility that underpin human experience in the Indian Ocean region. But studies of merchant and commercial activities have paid little attention to the role that cargoes have played in connecting the disparate parts of this vast oceanic world. Drawing from the work of anthropologists, geographers, and historians, Cargoes in Motion tells the story of how material objects have informed and continue to shape processes of exchange across the Indian Ocean. By following selected cargoes through both space and time, this book makes an important and innovative contribution to Indian Ocean studies. The multidisciplinary approach deepens our understanding of the nature and dynamics of the Indian Ocean world by showing how transoceanic connectivity has been driven not only by economic, social, cultural, and political factors but also by the materiality of the objects themselves. Essays by: Edward A. Alpers Fahad Ahmad Bishara Eva-Maria Knoll Karl-Heinz Kohl Lisa Jenny Krieg Pedro Machado Rupert Neuhöfer Mareike Pampus Hannah Pilgrim Burkhard Schnepel Hanne Schönig Tansen Sen Steven Serels Julia Verne Kunbing Xiao

Monetary Transitions
Monetary Transitions

Author: Karin Pallaver

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-11-16

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 3030834611

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This book uses money as a lens through which to analyze the social and economic impact of colonialism on African societies and institutions. It is the first book to address the monetary history of the colonial period in a comprehensive way, covering several areas of the continent and different periods, with the ultimate aim of understanding the long-term impact of colonial monetary policies on African societies. While grounding an understanding of money in terms of its circulation, acceptance and impact, this book shows first and foremost how the monetary systems that resulted from the imposition of colonial rule on African societies were not a replacement of the old currency systems with entirely new ones, but were rather the result of the convergence of different orders of value and monetary practices. By putting histories of people using money at the heart of the story, and connecting them to larger imperial policies, the volume provides a new and fresh perspective on the history of the establishment of colonial rule in Africa. This book is the result of a collaborative and interdisciplinary research project that has received funding by the Gerda Henkel Foundation. The contributors are both junior and senior scholars, based at universities in Europe, Africa, Asia and the US, who are all specialists on the history of money in Africa. It will appeal to an international audience of scholars and educators interested in African Studies and History, Economic History, Imperial and Colonial History, Development Studies, Monetary Studies.

Poverty and Wealth in East Africa
Poverty and Wealth in East Africa

Author: Rhiannon Stephens

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2022-10-24

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 1478024518

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In Poverty and Wealth in East Africa Rhiannon Stephens offers a conceptual history of how people living in eastern Uganda have sustained and changed their ways of thinking about wealth and poverty over the past two thousand years. This history serves as a powerful reminder that colonialism and capitalism did not introduce economic thought to this region and demonstrates that even in contexts of relative material equality between households, people invested intellectual energy in creating new ways to talk about the poor and the rich. Stephens uses an interdisciplinary approach to write this history for societies without written records before the nineteenth century. She reconstructs the words people spoke in different eras using the methods of comparative historical linguistics, overlaid with evidence from archaeology, climate science, oral traditions, and ethnography. Demonstrating the dynamism of people’s thinking about poverty and wealth in East Africa long before colonial conquest, Stephens challenges much of the received wisdom about the nature and existence of economic and social inequality in the region’s deeper past.

Animal Trade Histories in the Indian Ocean World
Animal Trade Histories in the Indian Ocean World

Author: Martha Chaiklin

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-07-21

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 3030425959

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This book examines trades in animals and animal products in the history of the Indian Ocean World (IOW). An international array of established and emerging scholars investigate how the roles of equines, ungulates, sub-ungulates, mollusks, and avians expand our understandings of commerce, human societies, and world systems. Focusing primarily on the period 1500-1900, they explore how animals and their products shaped the relationships between populations in the IOW and Europeans arriving by maritime routes. By elucidating this fundamental yet under-explored aspect of encounters and exchanges in the IOW, these interdisciplinary essays further our understanding of the region, the environment, and the material, political and economic history of the world.

The Palgrave Handbook of Bondage and Human Rights in Africa and Asia
The Palgrave Handbook of Bondage and Human Rights in Africa and Asia

Author: Gwyn Campbell

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-01-14

Total Pages: 439

ISBN-13: 134995957X

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In the West, human bondage remains synonymous with the Atlantic slave trade. But large slave systems in Africa and Asia predated, co-existed, and overlapped with the Atlantic system—and have persisted in modified forms well into the twenty-first century, posing major threats to political and economic stability within those regions and worldwide. This handbook examines the deep historical roots of unfree labour in Africa and Asia along with its contemporary manifestations. It takes an innovative longue durée perspective in order to link the local and global, the past and present. Contributors trace shifting forms of forced labour in the region since circa 1800, connecting punctual shocks such as environmental crisis, conflict, market instability, and crop failure to human security threats such as impoverishment, violence, migration, kidnapping, and enslavement. Together, these chapters illuminate the historical and contemporary dimensions of bondage in Africa and Asia, with important implications for the fight against modern-day bondage and human trafficking.

Currencies of the Indian Ocean World
Currencies of the Indian Ocean World

Author: Steven Serels

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2019-08-24

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 3030209733

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This book is the first to trace the unique monetary history of the Indian Ocean World. Long-distance trade across the region was facilitated by a highly complex multi-currency system undergirded by shared ideas that transcended ethno-linguistic, religious and class divisions. Currencies also occupied key roles in local spiritual, aesthetic and affective practices. Foregrounding these tensions between the global/universalistic and the local/particularistic, the volume shows how this traditional currency system remained in place until the middle of the twentieth century, and how aspects of the system continue to inform monetary practices throughout the region. With case studies covering China, India, the Arabian Sea, the Red Sea, East Africa, Zanzibar, Madagascar and Mauritius from the thirteenth to the twenty-first centuries, this volume explores the central role currencies played in economic exchange as well as in establishing communal bonds, defining state power and expressing religious sentiments.

African Journey
African Journey

Author: Tony Gaston

Publisher:

Published: 2019-09-23

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 9781525549793

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Fresh out of university in 1968, Tony Gaston set out to explore for birds in the Ahaggar Mountains of the central Sahara. Without a map or compass, he continued south to Niger and westwards to Liberia and Sierra Leone, traveling on trucks and buses and on foot through countries just emerging from colonialism. He carried little more than a sleeping bag, a teapot, and a pair of binoculars to pursue his passion for birdwatching, and relied on his wits and the kindness of strangers to help him along. He encountered many extraordinary people on the way, including Peace Corps volunteers and missionaries, policemen and prostitutes, barkeepers and beggars, whose stories mix with his own and give shape to his adventures. On the fiftieth anniversary of his trip, Tony casts a quizzical gaze on the past and its characters, forming a reminiscence of youth in the gentler era of the 1960s. Drawing from his memory and written records, this tale explores the nature of recollection in later life and the fluid association wealth and well-being....

Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century
Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century

Author: Bethwell A. Ogot

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 1088

ISBN-13: 9780435948115

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The result of years of work by scholars from all over the world, The UNESCO General History of Africa reflects how the different peoples of Africa view their civilizations and shows the historical relationships between the various parts of the continent. Historical connections with other continents demonstrate Africa's contribution to the development of human civilization. Each volume is lavishly illustrated and contains a comprehensive bibliography. This fifth volume of the acclaimed series covers the history of the continent from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the close of the eighteenth century in which two themes emerge: first, the continuing internal evolution of the states and cultures of Africa during this period second, the increasing involvement of Africa in external trade--with major but unforeseen consequences for the whole world. In North Africa, we see the Ottomans conquer Egypt. South of the Sahara, some of the larger, older states collapse, and new power bases emerge. Traditional religions continue to coexist with both Christianity (suffering setbacks) and Islam (in the ascendancy). Along the coast, particularly of West Africa, Europeans establish a trading network which, with the development of New World plantation agriculture, becomes the focus of the international slave trade. The immediate consequences of this trade for Africa are explored, and it is argued that the long-term global consequences include the foundation of the present world-economy with all its built-in inequalities.

They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky
They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky

Author: Benjamin Ajak

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Published: 2015-08-11

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 1610395999

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The inspiring story of three young Sudanese boys who were driven from their homes by civil war and began an epic odyssey of survival, facing life-threatening perils, ultimately finding their way to a new life in America. Between 1987 and 1989, Alepho, Benjamin, and Benson, like tens of thousands of young boys, took flight from the massacres of Sudan's civil war. They became known as the Lost Boys. With little more than the clothes on their backs, sometimes not even that, they streamed out over Sudan in search of refuge. Their journey led them first to Ethiopia and then, driven back into Sudan, toward Kenya. They walked nearly one thousand miles, sustained only by the sheer will to live. They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky is the three boys' account of that unimaginable journey. With the candor and the purity of their child's-eye-vision, Alephonsian, Benjamin, and Benson recall by turns: how they endured the hunger and strength-sapping illnesses-dysentery, malaria, and yellow fever; how they dodged the life-threatening predators-lions, snakes, crocodiles and soldiers alike-that dogged their footsteps; and how they grappled with a war that threatened continually to overwhelm them. Their story is a lyrical, captivating, timeless portrait of a childhood hurled into wartime and how they had the good fortune and belief in themselves to survive.