This book contends that one of the primary motivations of British colonialism in southern Africa at the end of the 19th century was to create a cheap, readily available supply of African labour through conquest, dispossession, taxation and the creation of native reserves or locations, doing everything in its power to reduce southern Africa's indigenous population to wage earners dependent on Europeans for their survival. In doing so, they laid the foundation for apartheid in the 20th century.
A sweeping history of our enduring passion for diamonds—and the exploitative industry that fuels it. Blood, Sweat and Earth is a hard-hitting historical exposé of the diamond industry, focusing on the exploitation of workers and the environment, the monopolization of uncut diamonds, and how little this has changed over time. It describes the use of forced labor and political oppression by Indian sultans, Portuguese colonizers in Brazil, and Western industrialists in many parts of Africa—as well as the hoarding of diamonds to maintain high prices, from the English East India Company to De Beers. While recent discoveries of diamond deposits in Siberia, Canada, and Australia have brought an end to monopolization, the book shows that advances in the production of synthetic diamonds have not yet been able to eradicate the exploitation caused by the world’s unquenchable thirst for sparkle.
"Relations between the United States and South Africa - or the parts of the world these nations now occupy - go nearly as far back as the very beginning of their inception as permanent European colonial intrusions. This book is a critical overview of these relations from the late seventeenth century to the present. Unprecedented in its scope - and supported by substantive and detailed notes, together with an extensive bibliography, chronology, glossary, and appendices - the book distinguishes itself from extant works in a number of other ways. Set against the backdrop of a wider interdisciplinary exploration of both ideational and structural issues of historical context, it not only gives attention to the importance of contributions from nonofficial actors in shaping official relations, but also considers the impact of the geo-political location of South Africa within southern Africa, where the presence of other nations - particularly Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, and Zimbabwe - looms large. Methodologically written from the perspectives of both traditional narrative history and Khaldunian interpretive historical analysis, the book consequently sits at the interdisciplinary interstice of political economy and sociology, where the aim is to advance our understanding of the Braudelian interconnectedness of world history as an important diachronic determinant of the diplomacy of foreign relations. Written for both scholars and policy analysts, this book's examination of the agency of the marginalized should also be of interest to activists and the reading public."--BOOK JACKET.
A comprehensive and revealing compilation of essays analyzing the varied dimensions of national identities and nationalisms across world regions and through time. The pervasiveness of nationalism, its many manifestations over the centuries, and the widely scattered way it has been studied make it a particularly difficult subject to approach and explore. ABC-CLIO offers the finest comprehensive reference available on an essential topic in modern world history. Across four volumes, Nations and Nationalism: A Global Historical Overview covers all aspects of nationalism, in all parts of the world, from the time of the French Revolution to the present day. Nations and Nationalism helps students, researchers, and other interested readers explore national identities and nationalistic movements in historical context. Organized chronologically, its four volumes combine thematic essays on different characteristics of nationalism with case studies of key historical developments involving specific nations at specific times. The encyclopedia focuses on Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia, with featured coverage of nationalist cultural creations, including literature, music, symbols, and mythologies.
When most people think of the prohibition era, they think of speakeasies, gin runners, and backwoods fundamentalists railing about the ills of strong drink. In other words, in the popular imagination, it is a peculiarly American event.Yet, as Mark Lawrence Schrad shows in Smashing the Liquor Machine, the conventional scholarship on prohibition is extremely misleading for a simple reason: American prohibition was just one piece of a global wave of prohibition laws that occurred around the same time. Schrad's counterintuitiveglobal history of prohibition looks at the anti-alcohol movement around the globe through the experiences of pro-temperance leaders like Thomas Masaryk, founder of Czechoslovakia, Vladimir Lenin, Leo Tolstoy, and anti-colonial activists in India. Schrad argues that temperance wasn't "Americanexceptionalism" at all, but rather one of the most broad-based and successful transnational social movements of the modern era. In fact, Schrad offers a fundamental re-appraisal of this colorful era to reveal that temperance forces frequently aligned with progressivism, social justice, liberalself-determination, democratic socialism, labor rights, women's rights, and indigenous rights. By placing the temperance movement in a deep global context, he forces us to fundamentally rethink all that we think we know about the movement. Rather than a motley collection of puritanical Americanevangelicals, the global temperance movement advocated communal self-protection against the corrupt and predatory "liquor machine" that had become exceedingly rich off the misery and addictions of the poor around the world, from the slums of South Asia to central Europe to the Indian reservations ofthe American west.Unlike many traditional "dry" histories, Smashing the Liquor Machine gives voice to minority and subaltern figures who resisted the global liquor industry, and further highlights that the impulses that led to the temperance movement were far more progressive and variegated than American readers havebeen led to believe.
This book engages in the long-standing debate on the relationship between capitalism and colonialism. Specifically, Rönnbäck and Broberg study the interaction between imperialist policies, colonial institutions and financial markets. Their primary method of analysis is examining micro- and macro-level data relating to a large sample of ventures operating in Africa and traded on the London Stock Exchange between 1869 and 1969. Their study shows that the relationship between capital and colonialism was highly complex. While return from investing in African colonies on average was not extraordinary, there were certainly many occasions when investors enjoyed high return due to various forms of exploitation. While there were actors with rational calculations and deliberate strategies, there was also an important element of chance in determining the return on investment – not least in the mining sector, which overall was the most important business for investment in African ventures during this period. This book finally also demonstrates that the different paths of decolonization in Africa had very diverse effects for investors.
In this sweeping, definitive work, historian David Crowe offers an unflinching account of the long and troubled history of genocide and war crimes. From ancient atrocities to more recent horrors, he traces their disturbing consistency but also the heroic efforts made to break seemingly intractable patterns of violence and retribution.
Women Rewriting Boundaries expands the work of gender and literary scholars by offering fresh insights on how to read travel writing by women. It analyzes the connections between class, gender, physicality, and sexuality as found in nineteenth-century literature. The authors discuss the myriad ways in which women writers reinforced and challenged Victorian social norms. Inspired by a special topics panel, “Women Writing Boundaries,” presented at the 2013 Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association’s annual convention, this edited collection will be a thought-provoking resource for college- level humanities and gender studies students and their instructors.
The pioneering work in the study of the role of Black Americans during Reconstruction by the most influential Black intellectual of his time. This pioneering work was the first full-length study of the role black Americans played in the crucial period after the Civil War, when the slaves had been freed and the attempt was made to reconstruct American society. Hailed at the time, Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880 has justly been called a classic.
