Blacksmiths of Ilamba

Blacksmiths of Ilamba
Author: Crislayne Alfagali
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2023-05-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 3110788284

This study analyzes the establishment of an iron foundry in the interior 18th-century of Angola. It was a fruit of the Portuguese Enlightenment, which encouraged investment in manufacturing, particularly of iron, a metal indispensable for military and technological purposes. However, the plans faced the resistance of African blacksmiths and founders who refused to learn foreign techniques and work processes. By emphasizing Central African agency, the book highlights the successful strategies of historical actors who scholars have largely ignored. Based upon a wide variety of sources from Brazilian, Portuguese, and Angolan archives, the book reconstructs how Africans were taken to work at the foundry and the important role they played in developing the form of production employed there. By emphasizing continuities with African technology and the quality of the iron produced, it counters interpretations of the project as an example of the failure of the Portuguese Enlightenment. The analysis demonstrates the circulation of knowledge about iron production, thus revitalizing debates that have posited knowledge transmission as unidirectional. It also highlights the relationship between local political leaders and the colonial government, in addition to elucidating the processes by which workers were organized.

The Gift

The Gift
Author: Ana Lucia Araujo
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2023-11-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108839290

Reveals how gifts of prestige shaped interactions between Africans and Europeans during the era of the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism.

Current Trends in Slavery Studies in Brazil

Current Trends in Slavery Studies in Brazil
Author: Stephan Conermann
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 438
Release: 2023-05-22
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3111026981

African slaves were brought into Brazil as early as 1530, with abolition in 1888. During those three centuries, Brazil received 4,000,000 Africans, over four times as many as any other American destination. Comparatively speaking, Brazil received 40% of the total number of Africans brought to the Americas, while the US received approximately 10%. Due to this huge influx of Africans, today Brazil’s African-descended population is larger than the population of most African countries. Therefore, it is no surprise that Slavery Studies are one of the most consolidated fields in Brazilian historiography. In the last decades, a number of discussions have flourished on issues such as slave agency, slavery and law, slavery and capitalism, slave families, demography of slavery, transatlantic slave trade, abolition etc. In addition to these more consolidated fields, current research has focused on illegal enslavement, global perspectives on slavery and the slave trade, slavery and gender, the engagement of different social groups in the abolitionist movement or Atlantic connections. Taking into consideration these new trends of Brazilian slavery studies, this volume of collected articles gives leading scholars the chance to present their research to a broader academic community. Thus, the interested reader get to know in more detail these current trends in Brazilian historiography on slavery.

Blacksmiths of Ilamba

Blacksmiths of Ilamba
Author: Crislayne Alfagali
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2023-05-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 3110788152

This study analyzes the establishment of an iron foundry in the interior 18th-century of Angola. It was a fruit of the Portuguese Enlightenment, which encouraged investment in manufacturing, particularly of iron, a metal indispensable for military and technological purposes. However, the plans faced the resistance of African blacksmiths and founders who refused to learn foreign techniques and work processes. By emphasizing Central African agency, the book highlights the successful strategies of historical actors who scholars have largely ignored. Based upon a wide variety of sources from Brazilian, Portuguese, and Angolan archives, the book reconstructs how Africans were taken to work at the foundry and the important role they played in developing the form of production employed there. By emphasizing continuities with African technology and the quality of the iron produced, it counters interpretations of the project as an example of the failure of the Portuguese Enlightenment. The analysis demonstrates the circulation of knowledge about iron production, thus revitalizing debates that have posited knowledge transmission as unidirectional. It also highlights the relationship between local political leaders and the colonial government, in addition to elucidating the processes by which workers were organized.

Lamba Folk-lore

Lamba Folk-lore
Author: Clement Martyn Doke
Publisher: Corinthian Press
Total Pages: 600
Release: 1927
Genre: Social Science
ISBN:

Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola

Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola
Author: Mariana P. Candido
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2022-09-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1009059955

Exploring the multifaceted history of dispossession, consumption, and inequality in West Central Africa, Mariana P. Candido presents a bold revisionist history of Angola from the sixteenth century until the Berlin Conference of 1884–5. Synthesising disparate strands of scholarship, including the histories of slavery, land tenure, and gender in West Central Africa, Candido makes a significant contribution to ongoing historical debates. She demonstrates how ideas about dominion and land rights eventually came to inform the appropriation and enslavement of free people and their labour. By centring the experiences of West Central Africans, and especially African women, this book challenges dominant historical narratives, and shows that securing property was a gendered process. Drawing attention to how archives obscure African forms of knowledge and normalize conquest, Candido interrogates simplistic interpretations of ownership and pushes for the decolonization of African history.

Worlds of Labour in Latin America

Worlds of Labour in Latin America
Author: Paola Revilla Orías
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2022-01-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 3110759306

This book reflects the development of Latin American labour history across broad geographical, chronological and thematic perspectives, which seek to review and revisit key concepts at different levels. The contributions are closely linked to the most recent trends in Global Labour History and in turn, they enrich those trends. Here, authors from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico, Peru and Spain take a historical and sociological perspective and analyse a series of problems relating to labour relations. The chapters weave together different periods of Latin American colonial and republican history from the vice-royalties of New Spain (now Mexico) and Peru, the Royal Audiencia de Charcas (now Bolivia), Argentina and Uruguay (former vice-royalty of Río de La Plata) and Chile (former Capitanía General).

Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585-1660

Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585-1660
Author: Linda M. Heywood
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2007-09-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 0521770653

This book establishes Central Africa as the origin of most Africans brought to English and Dutch American colonies in North America, the Caribbean, and South America before 1660. It reveals that Central Africans were frequently possessors of an Atlantic Creole culture and places the movement of slaves and creation of the colonies within an Atlantic historical framework.

The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa

The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa
Author: David Livingstone
Publisher:
Total Pages: 632
Release: 1875
Genre: Africa, Central
ISBN:

David Livingstone (1813-73) was a Scottish missionary and medical doctor who explored much of the interior of Africa. Livingstone's most famous expedition was in 1866-73, when he traversed much of central Africa in an attempt to find the source of the Nile. This book contains the daily journals that Livingstone kept on this expedition, from his first entry on January 28, 1866, when he arrived at Zanzibar (in present-day Tanzania), to his last on April 27, 1873, four days before he died from malaria and dysentery in a village near Lake Bangweulu in present-day Zambia. In his more than seven-year journey, Livingstone was assisted by friendly African chiefs and at times by Arab slave traders, whose activities he abhorred. His journals contain detailed observations on the people, plants, animals, topography, and climate of central Africa, as well as on the slave trade. The journals also provide Livingstone's account of his meeting with Henry Morton Stanley in the fall of 1871. Stanley had been sent by the New York Herald to find the explorer, but was unable to convince him to return to England. Livingstone's last entry reads: "Knocked up quite, and remain--recover--sent to buy milch-goats. We are on the banks of the Molilamo." After Livingstone's death, his African servants Susi and Chuma saved the journals for transport to England, where they were edited and published by Livingstone's friend Horace Waller.