bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Slave Exports from West and West-Central Africa, 1700–1810: new estimates of volume and distribution
Authors: Richardson David
Published: January 2009

Using new evidence on the British, French and North American slave-carrying trades, this article seeks to revise Lovejoy's recently published estimates of the levels of slave exports from West and West-Central Africa in the eighteenth century. The figures suggest that Lovejoy's estimate of the total volume of slave exports from the west coast of Africa to America between 1700 and 1810 was probably reasonably accurate, being only 8 per cent lower than the total indicated here. However, the new data reveal temporal and coastal distributions of slave exports that differ substantially from those proposed by Lovejoy. In particular, they suggest that previous work significantly understated levels of slave exports between 1713 and 1740, and again in the 1760s and 1770s. Contrary to earlier findings, in fact, it appears that slave exports from the west coast of Africa to America in the decade prior to the War of American Independence were very similar to levels attained after 1783. Furthermore, in terms of coastal distributions, it seems that the Bight of Biafra and West-Central Africa, particularly the Loango coast, contributed much more substantially to the slave traffic to America during the early decades of the century than was previously assumed. These revisions of Lovejoy's figures have important implications for movements in slave prices in Africa and for assessing the demographic effects of the trade on the slave-supplying regions. In addition, they help to improve our understanding of the relationship between the slave trade and changes in sugar and other commodity production in America during the eighteenth century.
Hendrik Albertus and his Ex-slave Mey: A Drama in Three Acts
Authors: Mason John Edwin
Published: January 2009

This essay draws on documents relating to a single extraordinary episode, and on supporting materials, to illustrate aspects of the mentalités of slaves, slave-owners, and Protectors of Slaves in the British South African colony of the Cape of Good Hope. The narrative follows the story of a slave, Mey, who was harshly beaten twice within six days in 1832. Mey, and several other slaves who had been whipped for the same offence, accepted the first punishment; Mey complained about the second, which he alone suffered, to a colonial official called the Protector of Slaves. The Protector vigorously investigated the complaint. Mey's master, Hendrik Albertus van Niekerk, co-operated only reluctantly with the investigation. As the Protector pursued the case, van Niekerk suddenly brought it to an end by manumitting Mey, giving cash compensation to the other slaves he had whipped, and paying legal fines.

The behaviour of each of the men fails to conform to the roles conventional wisdom has prepared for masters, slaves, and colonial officials. The essay demonstrates that the men were not eccentric, but that they were both rational and representative of their class. Mey acted as he did because the slaves had developed a ‘moral economy of the lash’ and because the second beating fell outside the boundaries of acceptable punishment by those standards. The Protector prosecuted van Niekerk with determination because he believed the punishment had been brutal and capricious and because Mey was a good slave who had been wronged. Hendrik Albertus freed Mey and compensated the other slaves because he refused to accept the legitimacy of the Protector. He settled the case before he was forced to visit the Protector's office or face Mey in court. To have honored the law and to have answered Mey's charge directly would have been to dishonor himself. He would have compromised the power and authority on which his honor as a slave-owner rested. Hendrik Albertus valued his honor more highly than one slave and a few pounds Sterling.
THe Volume, Age/Sex Ratios, and African Impact of the Slave Trade: Some Refinements of Paul Lovejoy's Review of the Literature
Authors: Eltis David
Published: January 2009

Continuing the discussion of issues relating to Africa that arise from research into the volume of the Atlantic slave trade, this comment pursues three points raised by Paul Lovejoy's recent update in the Journal of African History (December 1989). An independent count of the data in the Mettas-Daget catalogue of French slaving ships and a careful assessment of its possible incompleteness makes it unlikely that upward adjustment greater than 12 per cent can be justified, giving an overall total for French exports from Africa of 1,125,000 for the period 1700–1810. Analysis of other research reconfirms the conventional estimate of two males carried abroad for every female slave. Finally, formal supply-demand theory interprets lower export prices for slaves in the nineteenth century as implying that internal African demand for slave labor did not fully replace demand from the Atlantic, thus modifying Lovejoy's linkage of a ‘transformation’ toward increased use of slaves to economic changes outside Africa; the reasons for possible increased use of slaves in nineteenth-century Africa must therefore lie within the continent.
The State and Pre-Colonial Demographic History: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Madagascar
Authors: Campbell Gwyn
Published: January 2009

This paper analyses the demography of nineteenth-century Madagascar in the light of the debate generated by the demographic transition theory. Both supporters and critics of the theory hold to an intrinsic opposition between human and ‘natural’ factors, such as climate, famine and disease, influencing demography. They also suppose a sharp chronological divide between the pre-colonial and colonial eras, arguing that whereas ‘natural’ demographic influences were of greater importance in the former period, human factors predominated thereafter. This paper argues that in the case of nineteenth-century Madagascar the human factor, in the form of the Merina state, was the predominant demographic influence. However, the impact of the state was felt through natural forces, and it varied over time. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Merina state policies stimulated agricultural production, which helped to create a larger and healthier population and laid the foundation for Merina military and economic expansion within Madagascar. From the 1820, the cost of such expansionism led the state to increase its exploitation of forced labour at the expense of agricultural production and thus transformed it into a negative demographic force. Infertility and infant mortality, which were probably more significant influences on overall population levels than the adult mortality rate, increased from 1820 due to disease, malnutrition and stress, all of which stemmed from state forced labour policies. Available estimates indicate little if any population growth for Madagascar between 1820 and 1895. The demographic ‘crisis’ in Africa, ascribed by critics of the demographic transition theory to the colonial era, stemmed in Madagascar from the policies of the imperial Merina regime which in this sense formed a link to the French regime of the colonial era. In sum, this paper questions the underlying assumptions governing the debate about historical demography in Africa and suggests that the demographic impact of political forces be re-evaluated in terms of their changing interaction with ‘natural’ demographic influences.
Noise Over Camouflaged Polygamy, Colonial Morality Taxation, and a Woman-Naming Crisis in Belgian Africa
Authors: Hunt Nancy Rose
Published: January 2009

This paper highlights analytical and historical commonalities between Belgian African anti-polygamy measures and the unusual practice of taxing urban un-married women. Secondly, it interprets the 1950s rebellion against this tax in Bujumbura in light of how the colonial category of femme libre and a 1950 antipolygamy law converged in the Muslim African community of Buyenzi. Colonial categories and camouflage, name-giving and name-calling, noise and silence are central to the interpretation.

Belgian African anti-polygamy attitudes and measures are first reviewed, including polygamous wife liberations in the Leopoldian period; the introduction of supplementary wife taxation in 1910; demographic anxieties from the 1920s; and post-World War II worries about ‘camouflaged polygamy’, leading to the passage of the anti-polygamy law in 1950. The published evidence of ‘camouflaged polygamy's’ noisiest critics, élite African ‘new men’ or évolués, suggests that polygamy was increasing in rural areas due to forced labour obligations, and becoming camouflaged in response to pro-natalist rewards for monogamy. A second section analyses the urban single women's tax in terms of the embarrassed silence surrounding this new form of moral taxation, which was introduced following legislation in the 1930s designed to better differentiate ‘customary’ space from urban sites of ‘evolution’. A third section draws on Buyenzi women's oral memories to reconstruct their noisy rebellion against the tax. The conclusion analyses these Muslim women's outrage in light of the contradictions of gaining municipal revenue through moral taxation, an urban surveillance process which necessitated naming the category of persons taxed. The etymology of the term femme libre demonstrates that polygamous wife and prostitute were associated categories in colonial thought from the Leopoldian period. Colonial authorities lost control over these categories in this atypical ‘extra-customary’ township super-imposed on a pre-colonial ‘customary’ community. The new African need for camouflaging plural wives, created by the strong urban expulsion powers of the 1950 anti-polygamy law, converged with the name-calling of the single women's tax, resulting in a local struggle to control the naming process. The category of women created by the tax coalesced around the sexual insult embedded in the tax's name, embarrassing colonial authorities into exemptions and inciting the men of their community into a tax rebellion.
Sources of Conflict in Southern Africa,c.1800–30: The ‘Mfecane’ Reconsidered
Authors: Eldredge Elizabeth A.
Published: January 2009

The so-called ‘mfecane’ has been explained in many ways by historians, but never adequately. Julian Cobbing has absolved the Zulu of culpability for ongoing regional conflicts, but his work is severely flawed in its use of evidence. Cobbing is incorrect to argue that the Delagoa Bay slave trade existed on a large scale prior to the disruptions beginning in 1817, and European slaving therefore cannot have been a root cause of political turmoil and change, as he claims. Cobbing correctly identifies European-sponsored slave-raiding as a major cause of violence across the north-eastern Cape Frontier, but his accusations of missionary involvement are false. Jeff Guy's interpretation of the rise of the Zulu kingdom based on environmental factors is inadequate because he examined only stock-keeping and not arable land use, which led him to false conclusions about demography and politics. In this paper I argue that the socio-political changes and associated demographic turmoil and violence of the early nineteenth century in southern Africa were the result of a complex interaction between factors governed by the physical environment and local patterns of economic and political organization. Increasing inequalities within and between societies coupled with a series of environmental crises transformed long-standing competition over natural resources and trade in south-eastern Africa into violent struggles.
The Political Economy of Primary Railway Construction in the Rhodesias, 1890–1911
Authors: Lunn Jon
Published: January 2009

The main trunk lines of the Rhodesian railway system were built under the aegis of Cecil Rhodes' British South Africa Company (BSA Co.) between 1890 and 1911. This article begins with an analysis of the motivations behind railway construction during this period. It argues that interpretations which set up a dichotomy between ‘Rhodes-as-imperialist’ and ‘Rhodes-as-capitalist’ are misconceived. Nevertheless, it shows how the motivations behind railway development took on a more narrowly economic and financial character after the fiasco of the Jameson Raid in 1896 put paid to Rhodes' sub-imperial ambitions.

There follows an analysis of the economic and financial foundations of the BSA Co.'s regional railway monopoly. The article charts how railway construction was sustained through the manipulation of the interlocking interests of the BSA Co. and the Witwatersrand; through the creation of a ‘group structure’ of railway companies; and through the triangular relationship which developed between the BSA Co., Paulings, the monopoly contractor, and d'Erlangers, the chief broker and underwriter of railway loan (debenture) capital.

Finally, two fundamental allegations made by critics of the railway policy of the BSA Co. are assessed: firstly, that debenture finance was a means of distributing disguised dividends to itself and its friends; secondly, that these disguised dividends were paid for by the settlers through exorbitant railway rates. The nature of debt within the railway monopoly, the functions of debenture finance and the imperatives which shaped rating policy are discussed. The allegations are revealed to be ill-founded. It is argued that the tensions between the settlers and the BSA Co., their interdependence notwithstanding, were rooted in conflicting perceptions of what the priorities and parameters of economic development should be.
Ruling Relations: Rethinking State and Gender in South African History
Authors: Manicom Linzi
Published: January 2009

Although South African women's history has been growing in volume and sophistication over the past decade, the impact of gender analysis has yet to be felt in mainstream or radical historiography. One reason for this neglect is the way in which the categories of both ‘gender’ and ‘women’ have been conceived – with ‘women’ assumed to have a stable referent and ‘gender’ treated as synonymous with women. Those areas of social life where women are not immediately present have thus remained unreconstructed by the theoretical implications of gender. This is particularly the case with the history of ‘the state’.

The article identifies and looks critically at the major paradigms of South African women's and gender history in terms of how the relationship between ‘the state’ and ‘women’ is implicitly or explicitly represented. It argues that the understanding of the category ‘women’ as socially and historically constructed (as evident in more recently published gender history) provides a way of moving beyond the more static or abstractly posed state-versus-women relationship. This requires too that ‘the South African state’ be understood not as unitary or coherent but as institutionally diverse with different objectives being taken up and produced as policy and practice. The project then becomes one of understanding South African state formation as a gendered and gendering process, of exploring the different institutional sites and ruling discourses in which gender identities and categories are constructed.
The Pulse Model: Genesis and Accommodation of Specialization in the Middle Niger
Authors: McIntosh Roderick J.
Published: January 2009

By the mid-first millenniuma.d., Middle Niger cities took the form of many separate mounds clustered together. Many of these mounds may have been settlements of specialists. This distinctive city form may have had its origin in segmented, but articulated, Late Stone Age communities in the southern Sahara. The Pulse Model is an attempt to reconstruct the circumstances of environmental change and interactions among these communities that encouraged occupational specialization. The model predicts the best locations to search for evidence of early specialization, namely the several north–south trending palaeochannels of the southern Sahara. There, groups increasingly concerned with intensification of production within separate microenvironments would nevertheless have been in close contact. Climate shifts over the past several millennia create a ‘pulse’ of population movements, or shifts of ecological adaptations, along these long corridors. However, adaptation to climate change and stress incompletely explains the emergence of specialization. Tradition, myths, legends and material reinforcements of divisions between present-day ethnic and artisan groups in the Middle Niger suggest the ways in which corporate identity may have been constructed and maintained in the very distant past. If corporate identity can emerge in a form that discourages conflict between groups, the result might be increasingly specialized responses to climate change and to the economic and social opportunities of early urbanism. There should be no sharp discontinuity between the emerging specialization of the last millenniab.c.and the earlier clustered urbanism of cities such as Jenne-jeno. Middle Niger urbanism is an intensification of prehistoric social dynamics, not a revolutionary process.
The Invention of the ‘Tropical Worker’: Medical Research and the Quest for Central African Labor on the South African Gold Mines, 1903–36
Authors: Packard Randall M.
Published: January 2009

In 1903 the South African mining industry began recruiting African labor from Central Africa in order to shore up their labor supplies. From the outset, Central African recruitment was problematic, for Central African mine workers died at very high rates. The primary source of Central African mortality was pneumonia. In response to this high mortality the Union government threatened to close down Central African recruitment, a threat which they carried out in 1913. From 1911 to 1933, the mining industry fought to maintain, and then after 1913 to regain access to Central African labor. Of central importance in this struggle were efforts to develop a vaccine against pneumonia. While the mine medical community failed to produce an effective vaccine against pneumonia, the Chamber of Mines successfully employed the promise of a vaccine eventually to regain access to Central African Labor in 1934. The mines achieved this goal by controlling the terrain of discourse on the health of Central African workers, directing attention away from the unhealthy conditions of mine labor and toward the imagined cultural and biological peculiarities of these workers. In doing so the mines constructed a new social category, ‘tropical workers’ or ‘tropicals’. The paper explores the political, economic and intellectual environment within which this cultural construction was created and employed.
The 1952 Jan Van Riebeeck Tercentenary Festival: Constructing and Contesting Public National History in South Africa
Authors: Rassool Ciraj , Witz Leslie
Published: January 2009

For all approaches to the South African past the icon of Jan Van Riebeeck looms large. Perspectives supportive of the political project of white domination created and perpetuate the icon as the bearer of civilization to the sub-continent and its source of history. Opponents of racial oppression have portrayed Van Riebeeck as public (history) enemy number one of the South African national past. Van Riebeeck remains the figure around which South Africa's history is made and contested.

But this has not always been the case. Indeed up until the 1950s, Van Riebeeck appeared only in passing in school history texts, and the day of his landing at the Cape was barely commemorated. From the 1950s, however, Van Riebeeck acquired centre stage in South Africa's public history. This was not the result of an Afrikaner Nationalist conspiracy but arose out of an attempt to create a settler nationalist ideology. The means to achieve this was a massive celebration throughout the country of the 300th anniversary of Van Riebeeck's landing. Here was an attempt to display the growing power of the apartheid state and to assert its confidence.

A large festival fair and imaginative historical pageants were pivotal events in establishing the paradigm of a national history and constituting its key elements. The political project of the apartheid state was justified in the festival fair through the juxtaposition of ‘civilization’ and economic progress with ‘primitiveness’ and social ‘backwardness’. The historical pageant in the streets of Cape Town presented a version of South Africa's past that legitimated settler rule.

Just as the Van Riebeeck tercentenary afforded the white ruling bloc an opportunity to construct an ideological hegemony, it was grasped by the Non-European Unity Movement and the African National Congress to launch political campaigns. Through the public mediums of the resistance press and the mass meeting these organizations presented a counter-history of South Africa. These oppositional forms were an integral part of the making of the festival and the Van Riebeeck icon. In the conflict which played itself out in 1952 there was a remarkable consensus about the meaning of Van Riebeeck's landing in 1652. The narrative constructed, both by those seeking to establish apartheid and those who sought to challenge it, represented Van Riebeeck as the spirit of apartheid and the originator of white domination. The ideological frenzy in the centre of Cape Town in 1952 resurrected Van Riebeeck from obscurity and historical amnesia to become the lead actor on South Africa's public history stage.
KonnurokusΣm: Kinship and Family in the History of the Oyoko KɔKɔɔ Dynasty of Kumase
Authors: McCaskie T. C.
Published: January 2009

This paper is concerned with a vitally significant – but hitherto largely unrecovered – feature of the pre-colonial African past. Historians of Africa commonly pay conventional lip service to the idea that the structural and affective dimensions of kinship are of great, and even shaping, importance in the past of many of the societies that they study. However, such acknowledgements remain in the realm of generalization, and hardly any scholarship exists that seeks to historicize kinship in any detail. This paper tries to redress this situation. It goes beyond synchronic ethnographic commonplaces, and offers a historically documented analysis and interpretation of the operation of kinship within a specific pre-colonial context.

The subject matter is the West African forest kingdom of Asante (Ashanti), now located within the Republic of Ghana. In specific terms, the paper addresses the structural characteristics and the interpersonal dynamics of kinship within the history of the Kumase Oyoko KɔKɔɔ abusua (the ruling dynasty of Asante) between, very broadly, the 1760s and the 1880s. The discussion is centred on the evolving history of relations between individuals – most centrally the Asantehene Kwaku Dua Panin and the Asantehemaa Afua Sapon – within a particular ɔyafunu koro (uterine group or stirp; ‘family’) that was a componential part of the royal dynasty. The core of the paper is an analytic reading of the konnurokusΣm, a complex dynastic conflict that involved the individuals named and that occurred in the 1850s.

In sum, this paper argues that the reconstruction and analysis of the field of kinship relations within African societies – such as the example of pre-colonial Asante discussed here – places an extremely important, if hitherto neglected, tool in the hands of historians. The interpretation of events, the understanding of actions and motives, and the overall deepening of comprehension are all enriched by the use of this tool. The enrichment thereby attained – it is argued – pays appropriate and overdue attention to specifically indigenous readings of the Asante (and African) past.
Secular Power and Religious Authority in Muslim Society: the Case of Songhay
Authors: Hunwick John
Published: January 2009

The relationship between political power and religious authority has been a delicate one in Muslim societies. On the one hand, governments may attempt to silence religious authorities; on the other, they may themselves succumb to revolutions in the name of religion. More often governments have attempted to co-opt religious authorities as allies in exercising control or have worked directly in a power-sharing arrangement with them. In Songhay, as in several other states of pre-colonial Sudanic Africa, a more subtle balance was achieved between the ruling estate and the diverse body of scholars, mystics and holymen who made up the religious estate. The askiyas of sixteenth-century Songhay, while exercising full political power, saw it in their interest to maintain harmonious relations with these men of religion. Gifts in cash and kind, including slaves, grants of land and privilege, especially exemption from taxation, as well as recognition of rights of intercession and sanctuary, ensured their moral support and spiritual services and, importantly, protected rulers from their curse. Such a symbiosis was important for the stability of a large and ethnically diverse empire like Songhay, especially as regards its conquered western reaches, which were ethnically non-Songhay and had a strong Islamic cultural tradition. This delicate balance was upset by the Sacdian conquest of Songhay in 1591. Despite Moroccan assertions of Islamic legitimacy, religious authorities in Timbuktu were unsupportive, and harsh measures against them dealt a lasting blow to the equilibrium which had prevailed under the askiyas.
What's in a Drink? Class Struggle, Popular Culture and the Politics ofAkpeteshie(Local Gin) in Ghana, 1930–67
Authors: Akyeampong Emmanuel
Published: January 2009

This article examines the history ofakpeteshie(local gin) in Ghana from its illicit origins and widespread distillation in the 1930s to about 1967, when the Convention People's Party – seen as the ‘champion’ of theakpeteshieindustry – was overthrown.Akpeteshiedistillation proliferated when temperance interests succeeded in pressuring the colonial government into raising tariffs on imported liquor in 1930, just before the onset of a world-wide depression. Urban and rural workers, unable to afford expensive imported gin, became the patrons ofakpeteshie. For urban workers,akpeteshiecame to underpin an emerging popular culture.

Akpeteshiedistillation threatened the colonial government's prior dependence on revenue from imported liquor, raised the specter of crime and disorder, compromised colonial concerns about urban space, exposed the weakness of colonial rule and eventually led the British government into the embarrassing diplomatic position of seeking an alteration of the Saint Germain Convention of 1919 that had banned commercial distillation of spirits in the African colonies.

By the 1940s,akpeteshiehad emerged as an important symbol of African grievances under colonial rule. It became entwined in nationalist politics from the 1940s, and its legalization was one of the first legislative acts passed by the independent Ghanaian government. But the overwhelming African support forakpeteshieas an indigenous drink aside, the drink conjured images of class and popular protest that divided Ghanaian society and would unnerve independent African governments. As a cheap drink,akpeteshiebecame associated with the working-class experience, reflecting the social inequities within Ghanaian society and the undelivered promises of the independence struggle.
Explaining Surgical Evangelism in Colonial Southern Africa: Teeth, Pain and Faith
Authors: Landau Paul S.
Published: January 2009

Southern Africans configured missionaries as medical, bodily practitioners because of the meaning of ritual specialization in southern Africa. At the same time, ‘practicing medicine’ often meant minor surgery to missionaries, who lagged behind Europe's medical advances at the turn of the century. Whereas southern Africans located their well-being in the nexus of person and community, missionaries' surgery attacked this nexus. Surgery implied, and missionaries asserted, that healing derived from a resolution of interior somatic conflicts, in which troublesome body parts might be removed. A new way of speaking about certain kinds of physical pain was developed, whereby the body briefly became a total site for illness and healing. At the same time, Nonconformist evangelism demanded that individuals rid their interior selves of unsavory forces and extract themselves from those aspects of their communal lives which generated such influences. Because both Africans and missionaries moralized illness, and because some forms of surgery, like tooth-pulling, ‘worked’ for Africans, surgery marked a rite of passage to a new group of peers: Christians, who could recontextualize the catharsis of getting well.
Takrūr The History of a Name
Authors: Al-Naqar 'Umar
Published: January 2009

The generic term Takarīr (also Takarna) is a popular Middle Eastern concept applied to all West African Muslims. The progenitor of the name, to which the attribution Takarīr is made, is the ancient state of Takrūr, which existed briefly on the Senegal basin from ca. a.d. 1OOO and which was the first West African chieftaincy to accept Islam. This paper suggests that probably the earliest West African Muslims to be seen in the Middle East in recognizable numbers may have come from that state. Because the milieu of the Hijaz and the diversity of races frequenting the annual pilgrimage ceremonies encouraged generalizations, the name Takarīr was conveniently applied to West Africans. The ambiguity of the term may thus be seen to have progressively increased with the expansion of Islam in West Africa, while the name itself became sufficiently entrenched in popular usage for it to survive the fame of great West African empires like Mali and Songhay. The term ‘Bilad al-Takrūr’ is essentially the extension of the Middle Eastern concept of Takrūr and has therefore received various territorial definitions.
Komfo Anokye of Asante: Meaning, History and Philosophy in an African Society
Authors: McCaskie T. C.
Published: January 2009

This paper – which builds upon the author's previously published work on the forest kingdom of Asante (Ghana) – deals with the role of Komfo Anokye in Asante thought and history. The source materials and historiography pertaining to Komfo Anokye are critically reviewed, but the principal focus of the paper is on issues of cognition, belief and philosophy. Komfo Anokye's ‘place’ in Asante thought is analysed, and his meaning(s) identified with reference to Asante concerns about the nature of history, society and the human. The paper tries to go beyond epistemology and a ‘traditional’ reading of Asante religion and its practices to a hermeneutical interpretation of Komfo Anokye and the sense-meaning of Asante history. Philosophical and psychological issues are addressed in a historical context. The larger object of the paper is, by the example of Komfo Anokye and Asante history, to attempt to indicate a way forward for the Africanist historical enterprise in the understanding of meaning.
The Victorians and Africa: A Reconsideration of the Occupation of Egypt, 1882
Authors: Hopkins A. G.
Published: January 2009

This article offers a reassessment of Britain's decision to occupy Egypt in 1882. Research published since 1961, it is suggested, does not support the view put forward by Robinson and Gallagher in their celebrated book,Africa and the Victorians, that Britain intervened reluctantly to safeguard the Suez Canal in response to disorder in Egypt, or that she was led on by French initiatives. Moreover, the decision to occupy Egypt did not have the effect claimed by Robinson and Gallagher of precipitating the scramble for West and East Africa. It is argued instead that the causes of intervention lay in the metropole rather than on the periphery. British interests in Egypt were both important and expanding, and they were upheld by Conservative and Liberal governments in the period following the khedive's declaration of bankruptcy in 1876. This conclusion makes the Egyptian case less important in understanding the scramble for tropical Africa but more important in understanding late nineteenth-century imperialism. The occupation illustrates how the emergence of a particular configuration of economic and political forces in Britain found expression abroad after 1850; and it does so without invoking narrow or deterministic forms of historical explanation. Finally, it is suggested that the Egyptian case deserves a more prominent place in the study of theories of imperialism than it has received, because most of the ideas which enter modern scholarly discussion of this subject can be traced to the contemporary debate over the highly controversial decision taken by Britain in 1882.
Recent Archaeological Research and Dates from Central Africa
Authors: de Maret Pierre
Published: January 2009

Depuis la synthèse précédente, les recherches archéologiques se sont développées et diversifiées en Afrique Centrale.

Pour la préhistoire, des recherches prometteuses sont effectuées sur les processus géomorphoiogiques au Congo, ce qui permettra de mieux comprendre les problèmes posés par l'interpretation des vestiges découverts dans les formations sableuses.

Du Gabon à l'Angola, on assiste à un intérêt croissant pour les vestiges des populations qui exploitent la zone littorale depuis l'âge de la pierre récent et qui sont responsable de nombreux amas coquilliers.

A l'intérieur du continent, au Congo et au Rwanda, une série de nouvelles dates se rapportent à l'âge de la pierre récent, sans qu'il soit possible de préciser les
limites temporelles de ces industries.

Dans la moitié sud du Cameroun et à l'est de la Centrafrique, divers témoignages indiquent que depuis au moins le dernier millénaire avant notre ère cette partie de la forêt etait occupee par des populations sedentaires, utilisant de la ceramique, des haches polies et pratiquant sans doute une forme d'agriculture.

La fonte du fer semble débuter dans la région de Yaoundé vers le quatrième siècle avant notre ère. A l'est, au Rwanda et au Burundi, la métallurgie du fer paraît au moins aussi ancienne et l'on ne peut tout à fait exclure qu'elle soit même beaucoup plus ancienne, mais cela reste controversé. Au Congo, un fourneau pour fondre le fer a pu être daté du cinquième siècle de notre ère, tandis qu'un fourneau pour fondre le cuivre était daté du treizi`eme siècle de notre ère. Au Zaïre, dans la région du Shaba, la fonte de ces métaux remonte au quatrième siècle de notre ère.

Enfin, des séries systématiques de datations permettent d'esquisser durant l'âge des métaux les bases d'évolutions régionales au nord Cameroun, en Centrafrique, dans la cuvette centrale au Zaïre, et au Rwanda.
The Local Legend: A Product of Popular Culture
Authors: Simpson Jacqueline
Published: January 2009

In the study of folktales, both in Britain and internationally, the privileged genre has always been the fairytale, the märchen or ‘Wonder Tale’. These complex, picturesque stories, such as ‘Snow White’ or ‘Cinderella’, have attracted innumerable scholarly collectors and interpreters. There is, however, another kind of oral folk narrative, equally widespread but less glamorous, which has far more to offer to the student of popular rural culture. I refer to the kind of story technically known to English-speaking folklorists as a ‘legend’ (German Sage). This centres upon some specific place, person or object which really exists or has existed within the knowledge of those telling and hearing the story. It reflects the beliefs, moral judgements and everyday preoccupations of the social group, and is in many cases, though not invariably, told ‘as true’. Its aim is to hand on accounts of significant events alleged to have occurred in a particular community or area and it has no truck with ‘once.upon a time’ and the ‘never-never land’. While the fairytale is long and is told for its entertainment value, the legend is almost always brief, for its normal context is casual conversation, where it is recounted in order to inform, explain, warn or educate. Its style is sober and realistic, for though it may contain supernatural and fantastic elements, these are given maximum plausibility by being brought into close association with the physical localisation of the tale.
Southern Chartism
Authors: Wells Roger
Published: January 2009

Chartism, the first genuinely working-class mass political movement, has attracted numerous general, regional, and local histories. The overwhelming proportion of these works concentrate on Chartism's strongholds in London, provincial urban centres, and the theatres of industrialism — including those in Scotland and Wales. Yet despite these regional characteristics, the common assumption is that Chartism was a national movement. This assumption is implicit in works including J.T. Ward'sChartism, while Dorothy Thompson, the author of the most recent notionally national overview, suggests that countryside Chartism has been underestimated.
Romanian Villages: Rural Planning under Communism
Authors: Turnock David
Published: January 2009

The village is an important research theme in Romania in view of its significance for culture and ecology as well as the modernisation process. Interest developed after Romanian Independence but the efforts of the early historians like A.D. Xenopol (1847–1920) were greatly extended after the First World War, when the enlargement of frontiers, adding Transylvania (and temporarily Bessarabia) to the Old Kingdom embracing Moldavia and Wallachia, gave Romanian scholars access to the whole of the central Carpathian belt. Historians like C. Daicoviciu (1898–1973) and C.C. Giurescu (1901–77) were joined by ethnographers and sociologists, such as D. Gusti (1880–1955) and R. Vuia (1887–1963), ecologists like I. Simionescu (1873–1944) and geographers including I. Conea (1902–74) and V. Mihailescu (1890–1978).1Interdisciplinary research stimulated by royal patronage was particularly fruitful in the case of the project involving a selection of some sixty representative Romanian villages (‘60 sate romanesti’).2This gave rise to numerous publications, including monographs and shorter pieces, which formed the core of a distinguished sociology journal of the 1930s:Sociologie Romaneasca.
The Language of Tokens and the Making of Marriage
Authors: O'hara Diana
Published: January 2009

In the study of popular culture, the significance of gifts and tokens in the making of marriage has not been given the attention it deserves. The surviving artefacts alone merit closer examination and the role of such objects in dramatic and pictorial representations has yet to be adequately explored. If their full social and symbolic importance is to be understood, however, a close examination is necessary of acts of giving in precisely defined historical contexts. The richly detailed evidence of ecclesiastical depositions surviving for the diocese of Canterbury permits just such an examination. This evidence provides examples from rural communities in woodland, downland, marshland and lowland pays in Kent to the south and east of the River Medway, and shows their connections with local towns. And among these, the case ofDivers v. Williamsprovides unusually extensive information.
Swedish Rural Society and Political Culture: The Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Experience
Authors: Aronsson Peter
Published: January 2009

In 1776, baron Salomon von Otter, governor of the neighbouring county of Halland andjus patronatusof the local parish, stood opposite the men of Öja parish at a meeting outside the church. The powerful nobleman was for the third time arguing for the praiseworthy and legally required task of building a combined school and poor-house in cooperation with the neighbouring parish (where he happened to own most of the land). The peasants of Ö for a third time refused, both in writing and orally, on the grounds of their alleged right to self-government. The baron continued with his persuasions, and presented the support he had from the local nobility, among them the bishop. He was still met with a firm refusal. Eventually the baron ordered that they should build the house, referring (probably without much legal foundation) to his position asjus patronatus. Now everybody surrendered, except one farmer who refused to join in the final decision. This fact was carefully noted by the local clergyman, together with assurances that this unwise stubbornness would not suffice to impede the project.
‘How can a Poor Man Live?’ Resistance to Capitalist Development in Southern Illinois, 1870–1890.
Authors: Adams Jane
Published: January 2009

For better than a decade American historians have debated whether or not U.S. farmers were ‘capitalist’ or ‘non-capitalist’ during the nineteenth century. This debate has tended to use market integration as the key index for determining where they should be conceptually located,-although Henretta and Merrill, who fired the opening salvos in the debate, focused more on how farmers understood what they were doing, and Genovese has long insisted that the direct relations of production are the basis for defining specific modes of production. This argument is important not only insofar as it sharpens our knowledge of early American social formations, but also as it aids in interpreting political disputes that occurred on local and national levels.
Farming Practice in the Western Highlands and Islands before Crofting: A Study in Cultural Inertia or Opportunity Costs?
Authors: Dodgshon Robert A.
Published: January 2009

Farming in the western Highlands and Islands of Scotland was transformed over the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by the clearance of some townships to make way for commercial sheep production and the reorganisation of others into crofts. Commentaries on the region prior to these changes portray it as a cultural backwater, with communities employing a range of seemingly archaic and primitive practices. Early agricultural surveyors and ‘Improvers’ who visited or worked in the region were especially important in laying the foundation for this view. Admittedly, their near moral conviction about change and the virtues of new husbandry made them disdainful of traditional practice everywhere, even in the Lowlands. When it came to the western Highlands and Islands, though, their tone underwent a perceptible change, with words like primitive and barbaric creeping into their descriptions. Early travellers added to this picture of a region rooted in the past, with customs and practices that seemingly set it apart, chronologically as well as geographically, from the rest of Britain.
Towards the ‘Cottage Charter’: The Expressive Culture of Farm Workers in Nineteenth-Century England
Authors: Dyck Ian
Published: January 2009

A frequent complaint among English historians is that the farm workers were a ‘secret people’ who seldom interacted with the written or recorded word. If vaguely discernible in this or that statistic, or anonymous act of physical protest, the labourer's cultural and political consciousness was entombed (it is sometimes inferred) in that drudging physical pantomime which many nineteenth-century commentators assumed to be the primary attribute of ‘Hodge’. Even the labourers' contemporary friends harboured a ‘Hodge’ stereotype in their assumption that the labourers' aspirations, or ‘cottage charter’, were best represented and publicised by ‘articulate’ outsiders. William Cobbett, who for three decades argued that farm workers were capable of profound thought and articulation, implied as much in his observation that ‘Nobody (excepting himself) tells the tale of the labourer.’ In 1848, as a better known Charter was re-stated to the nation from the mass radical platform of the metropolis, Sidney Godolphin Osborne lamented that the labourer ‘has few to speak for him, few who care to face the odium of exposing the conduct of those individuals, or classes, or laws, who or which oppress him’. Five years later, with reference to the ‘peasant’ worker, Karl Marx made a similar assumption: ‘they must be represented’, he argued, and their representative ‘must appear as their master, as an authority over them.’ Even as late as 1880, shortly after the formation of the National Agricultural Labourers' Union, Richard Jefferies confidently proclaimed that ‘the country labourer possessed no clearly defined ‘Cottage Charter’ and no genuine programme of the future; that which is put forward in his name is not for him’.
Waste not, want not: traditional responses to crop failure in Greece
Authors: Halstead Paul
Published: January 2009

On May 29 1986, a storm tracked across central Macedonia. In the hills north of the small market town of Langadhas, a violent fall of hail flattened ripening cereal crops, but the destruction was very patchy: some fields belonging to the village of Assiros were devastated, but others were unharmed and the storm spared a neighbouring village before causing renewed damage further along its path. Farmers hit by the storm were lucky – they received compensation for their losses from the European Economic Community – but their neighbours were less fortunate. Across the whole region, the winter of 1985/6 had been virtually rainless and some farmers unaffected by the storm barely recouped their sowing costs.
Identifikation und Aufklärung von Veränderungssprüngen im individuellen Psychotherapieverlauf
Authors: Tschitsaz-Stucki Armita , Lutz Wolfgang
Published: January 2009

Zusammenfassung. Theoretischer Hintergrund: Die Identifikation diskontinuierlicher Veränderungen im Psychotherapieverlauf sowie deren Erklärung sind Gegenstand der modernen Psychotherapieforschung, welche die patientenorientierte Forschung sowie die Evaluation von Behandlungsfortschritt vorsieht. Fragestellungen: Ziel der vorliegenden Studie ist die Aufklärung möglicher Ursachen für Veränderungssprünge in positive und negative Richtung im Therapieprozess, welche als Sudden Gains und Sudden Losses definiert sind, sowie deren Zusammenhang zum Therapieerfolg. Methode: Mikroprozessanalytisch werden 128 kritische Sudden Gain- und Loss-Sitzungen hinsichtlich Prozessparametern wie therapeutischen Techniken, allgemeinen Wirkfaktoren, u.a. das interpersonale Verhalten der Therapeuten, aber auch außertherapeutische Elemente untersucht. Resultate: Die Analyse der kritischen Therapiesitzungen vor einem Sudden Gain oder Loss ergab, dass sich diese Sitzungstypen qualitativ voneinander unterscheiden und, wie in der bisherigen Forschung bestätigt, kognitive Veränderungen, interpersonale Aspekte der Therapeuten, die therapeutische Beziehung, der emotionale Status der Patienten und außertherapeutische Faktoren Einfluss nehmen. Schlussfolgerung: Die Bedeutung von diskontinuierlichen, insbesondere negativen, Therapieverläufen kann erfolgreich anhand mikroprozessanalytischer Methodik aufgezeigt werden.
Der Elfenbeinturm öffnet sich – Veränderungsprozesse im Hochschulbereich
Authors: Michel Alexandra , Stegmaier Ralf , Meiser Daniela , Sonntag Karlheinz
Published: January 2009

Zusammenfassung. In dieser Studie wurden Veränderungsprozesse im Hochschulbereich untersucht. Dabei wurde erstens postuliert, dass Information, Partizipation und Rechtfertigung in einem positiven Zusammenhang mit prozeduraler Gerechtigkeit stehen. Zweitens wurde angenommen, dass prozedurale Gerechtigkeit positiv mit Commitment to Change und Person-Organisations-Passung korreliert. Drittens wurde postuliert, dass prozedurale Gerechtigkeit den Zusammenhang zwischen Prozessmerkmalen und Commitment to Change bzw. Person-Organisations-Passung der Mitarbeiter mediiert. 315 wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiter einer deutschen Hochschule, an der mehrere Veränderungsprozessen stattfanden, wurden befragt. Die Ergebnisse der Testung des Strukturgleichungsmodells zeigten, dass Information und Rechtfertigung in einem signifikant positiven Zusammenhang mit prozeduraler Gerechtigkeit stehen. Die Ergebnisse demonstrierten auch signifikant positive Zusammenhänge zwischen prozeduraler Gerechtigkeit und Commitment to Change sowie Person-Organisations-Passung. Ebenfalls zeigten die Befunde, dass prozedurale Gerechtigkeit die positiven Zusammenhänge zwischen Information bzw. Rechtfertigung und Commitment to Change bzw. Person-Organisations-Passung mediiert.