NEW DIRECTIONS IN THE STUDY OF SLAVERY AND SLAVE TRADING - Sandra E. Greene. West African Narratives of Slavery: Texts from Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Ghana. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. xiv + 280 pp. Acknowledgments. Note on the Translations. Note on Ewe Orthography. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $28.00. Paper. - Robin Law, ed. Dahomey and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: The Journals and Correspondence of Vice-Consul Louis Fraser, 1851–1852. London: British Academy. vi + 287 pp. List of Maps. Appendixes. Endnotes. Sources and Bibliography. Index. £55.00. Cloth. - Randy J. Sparks. Where the Negroes Are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 328 pp. Important Terms, Names, and Places. Notes. Acknowledgments. Index. $29.95. Cloth.

In the 1950s, teams of Chinese government ethnologists helped liberate “slaves” whom they identified among the Wa people in the course of China’s military annexation and pacification of the formerly autonomous Wa lands, between China and Burma. For the Chinese, the “discovery” of these “slaves” proved the Engels-Morganian evolutionist theory that the supposedly primitive and therefore predominantly egalitarian Wa society was teetering on the threshold between Ur- Communism and ancient slavery. A closer examination of the historical and cultural context of slavery in China and in the Wa lands reveals a different dynamics of commodification, which also sheds light on slavery more generally. In this article I discuss the rejection of slavery under Wa kinship ideology, the adoption of child war captives, and the anomalous Chinese mine slaves in the Wa lands. I also discuss the trade in people emerging with the opium export economy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century which helped sustain, yet also threatened, autonomous Wa society. I suggest that past Wa “slave” trade was spurred by the same processes of commodification that historically drove the Chinese trade in people, and in recent decades have produced the large-scale human trafficking across Asia, which UN officials have labeled “the largest slave trade in history” and which often hides slavery under the cover of kinship.

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Greene, Sandra E. West African Narratives of Slavery. Texts from Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Ghana

Cahiers d études africaines ◽

10.4000/etudesafricaines.18239 ◽

2015 ◽

Author(s):

Rocío Munguia Aguilar

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

West African ◽

Early Twentieth Century ◽

Late Nineteenth

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Faeries, Aliens, and Leviathans: Science and Fantasy in Ian McDonald's King of Morning, Queen of Day

Irish University Review ◽

10.3366/iur.2019.0407 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 49 (2) ◽

pp. 290-303

Author(s):

Richard Howard

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

National Identity ◽

Science Fiction ◽

Science Studies ◽

Irish Studies ◽

Early Twentieth Century ◽

Politics And Religion ◽

Unexplored Area ◽

Late Nineteenth ◽

Cultural Movement

Irish science fiction is a relatively unexplored area for Irish Studies, a situation partially rectified by the publication of Jack Fennell's Irish Science Fiction in 2014. This article aims to continue the conversation begun by Fennell's intervention by analysing the work of Belfast science fiction author Ian McDonald, in particular King of Morning, Queen of Day (1991), the first novel in what McDonald calls his Irish trilogy. The article explores how McDonald's text interrogates the intersection between science, politics, and religion, as well as the cultural movement that was informing a growing sense of a continuous Irish national identity. It draws from the discipline of Science Studies, in particular the work of Nicholas Whyte, who writes of the ways in which science and colonialism interacted in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ireland.

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A Historiographical Interlude

10.1093/oso/9780198767176.003.0007 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Jonathan D. Teubner

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Sixth Century ◽

Early Twentieth Century ◽

Late Nineteenth

The ‘Historiographical Interlude’ presents a brief overview of the cultural, social, and political changes that occur between Augustine’s death in 430 CE and Boethius’ earliest theological writings (c.501 CE). When Augustine, Boethius, and Benedict are treated together in one unified analysis, several historiographical challenges emerge. This Interlude addresses several of these challenges and argues that trends within late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholarship established some unfounded interpretive biases. In particular, this section will discuss the contributions of Adolf von Harnack and Henri Irénée Marrou, focusing on how they contributed, in diverse ways, to the neglect of sixth-century Italy as a significant geographical site in the development of the Augustinian tradition.

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