Northern Rhodesia Tax Stamps as an Aid to Chronology

1987 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 363-368
Author(s):  
Mwelwa C. Musambachime
Keyword(s):  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Mnemonic Devices ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
History Of ◽  
Tax Payers

It is well known that historians studying preliterate societies, in which oral traditions are the main sources of data used in reconstructing the past, have experienced problems in ‘arranging’ events in their order of occurrence. To establish chronology, historians have used a number of aids such as mnemonic devices and occurrences of eclipses and droughts which are then correlated to the western calendar. This paper discusses an aid which, used together with oral traditions, can be very useful in reconstructing the early colonial history of Northern Rhodesia between 1910 and 1927. This aid is the tax stamp given to all tax payers during this period. To understand the importance of the tax stamps to chronology, perhaps it is best to begin with a description as to how events were recorded in the precolonial period.

How Finance Colonised Aotearoa: A Concise Counter-History

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 41
Author(s):  
Catherine Cumming
Keyword(s):  
Financial Institutions ◽  
The State ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Financial Instruments ◽  
Financial History ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
History Of

This paper intervenes in orthodox under-standings of Aotearoa New Zealand’s colonial history to elucidate another history that is not widely recognised. This is a financial history of colonisation which, while implicit in existing accounts, is peripheral and often incidental to the central narrative. Undertaking to reread Aotearoa New Zealand’s early colonial history from 1839 to 1850, this paper seeks to render finance, financial instruments, and financial institutions explicit in their capacity as central agents of colonisation. In doing so, it offers a response to the relative inattention paid to finance as compared with the state in material practices of colonisation. The counter-history that this paper begins to elicit contains important lessons for counter-futures. For, beyond its implications for knowledge, the persistent and violent role of finance in the colonisation of Aotearoa has concrete implications for decolonial and anti-capitalist politics today.  

COMBINING ORAL TRADITIONS AND BAYESIAN CHRONOLOGICAL MODELING TO UNDERSTAND VILLAGE DEVELOPMENT IN THE GULF OF PAPUA (PAPUA NEW GUINEA)

Radiocarbon ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Chris Urwin ◽  
Quan Hua ◽  
Henry Arifeae
Keyword(s):  
Papua New Guinea ◽  
New Guinea ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Spatial History ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Gulf Of Papua ◽  
The Village

ABSTRACT When European colonists arrived in the late 19th century, large villages dotted the coastline of the Gulf of Papua (southern Papua New Guinea). These central places sustained long-distance exchange and decade-spanning ceremonial cycles. Besides ethnohistoric records, little is known of the villages’ antiquity, spatiality, or development. Here we combine oral traditional and 14C chronological evidence to investigate the spatial history of two ancestral village sites in Orokolo Bay: Popo and Mirimua Mapoe. A Bayesian model composed of 35 14C assays from seven excavations, alongside the oral traditional accounts, demonstrates that people lived at Popo from 765–575 cal BP until 220–40 cal BP, at which time they moved southwards to Mirimua Mapoe. The village of Popo spanned ca. 34 ha and was composed of various estates, each occupied by a different tribe. Through time, the inhabitants of Popo transformed (e.g., expanded, contracted, and shifted) the village to manage social and ceremonial priorities, long-distance exchange opportunities and changing marine environments. Ours is a crucial case study of how oral traditional ways of understanding the past interrelate with the information generated by Bayesian 14C analyses. We conclude by reflecting on the limitations, strengths, and uncertainties inherent to these forms of chronological knowledge.

Indigenous Written Sources for the History of Bonny

1989 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 185-196
Author(s):  
Susan M. Hargreaves
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Niger Delta ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Additional Material ◽  
Court Records ◽  
General Terms ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
History Of ◽  
Similar Character ◽  
Written Sources

It is well known that indigenous contemporary written documentation exists for the precolonial and early colonial history of some of the coastal societies of South-Eastern Nigeria. The best known example is Old Calabar, for which there exists most notably the diary of Antera Duke, covering the years 1785-88, a document brought from Old Calabar to Britain already during the nineteenth century. More recently John Latham has discovered additional material of a similar character still preserved locally in Old Calabar, principally the Black Davis House Book (containing material dating from the 1830s onwards), the papers of Coco Bassey (including diaries covering the years 1878-89), and the papers of E. O. Offiong (comprising trade ledgers, court records, and letter books relating to the period 1885-1907). In the Niger Delta S. J. S. Cookey, for his biography of King Jaja of Opobo, was able to use contemporary documents in Jaja's own papers, including correspondence from the late 1860s onwards. In the case of the neighboring community of Bonny (from which Jaja seceded to found Opobo after a civil war in 1869), while earlier historians have alluded to the existence of indigenous written documentation, they have done so only in very general terms and without any indication of the quantity or nature of this material.

scholarly journals “Africa for the Africans?” – Mapmaking, Lagos, and the Colonial Archive

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 ◽  
pp. 275-296
Author(s):  
Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Population ◽  
African History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Digital Representations ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Colonial Archive ◽  
History Of ◽  
Story Maps ◽  
Ownership Of Land ◽  
Place And Identity

AbstractIn early colonial Lagos, struggles over race, place and identity were played out over ownership of land, and ended with the displacement of sections of the indigenous population. “Africa for the Africans” combines texts and maps to narrate the history of 1860s Lagos. This article demonstrates how, with Geographic Information Systems (GIS), European colonial maps can be used to analyze the significance of changing urban spatial relationships in 1860s Lagos. Though much of this analysis employs GIS, it also leans heavily on other tools for making timelines, story maps and vector diagrams. This process of creating digital representations of the past also has pedagogical applications, as these methods can be extended to the classroom for undergraduates learning about African history.

Note on the Life of Francisco de Cárdenas Valencia

1945 ◽  
Vol 2 (01) ◽  
pp. 21-29
Author(s):  
Eleanor B. Adams
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Important Work ◽  
Bibliographical Note ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Erroneous Belief ◽  
History Of

Very little has been known about the life of the seventeenth century Yucatecan historian, Francisco de Cárdenas Valencia, author of the Relación historial eclesiástica de la provincia de Yucatán. He completed this important work on the early colonial history of Yucatan in February, 1639, but although it was known and used by Diego López de Cogolludo and later historians, it remained unpublished for nearly three hundred years. In 1937 it was finally printed in the Biblioteca histórica mexicana de obras inéditas. In his bibliographical note to this edition, Federico Gómez de Orozco tells the history of the manuscript, refuting the erroneous belief that Cárdenas Valencia wrote two works, but he does not give much new data concerning its author.

A Brief History of Singapore

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Tarulevicz
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Technological Innovation ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
First Century ◽  
Space And Place ◽  
Japanese Occupation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
History Of

This chapter provides an account of Singapore's recent history, interwoven with key culinary and gastronomic developments. The conventional periodization of Singapore's history into the pre-colonial, Japanese occupation, merger, and independence eras highlights some of the forces that have shaped the nation, but it also privileges state actors. From the early colonial period onward, the ordering of space and place has been a priority that has been demonstrated at the bureaucratic, regulatory, and physical levels. In the past 200 years, Singapore has been radically remade; technological innovation has been one of the mechanisms by which order is achieved. Indeed, Singapore's engagement with the global economy—be that the economy of the British Empire or of the twenty-first-century world of food security fears—has been relentless, and food has been central to the process.

Freedom's Debtors

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Padraic X. Scanlan
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Economic Capital ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Business Interests ◽  
Abolitionist Movement ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
History Of ◽  
Insight Into

Freedom’s Debtors is a history of the British movement to abolish the slave trade, told through the lens of the history of early colonial Sierra Leone. After the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807, Sierra Leone became the judicial, military, and economic capital of British efforts to interdict slave ships. British antislavery, widely seen as a great sacrifice of economic and political capital on the altar of humanitarianism, was in fact profitable, militarily useful, and crucial to the expansion of British power in West Africa. The colony was closely connected to the elite leaders of the abolitionist movement in Britain, and became closely identified with their business interests. This history of the abolition of the British slave trade in Sierra Leone offers insight into how antislavery policies were used to justify colonialism and reframes a moment considered a watershed in British public morality as the beginning of morally ambiguous and exploitative colonial history. From Sierra Leone, it is easier to see British antislavery as it really was: acquisitive, devoted to coercive and gradual schemes for emancipation, militarised, and shot through with imperial ambitions.

Oral Traditions: Whose History

1981 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 165-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Spear
Keyword(s):  
Oral Traditions ◽  
African History ◽  
Evolutionary Patterns ◽  
Initial Report ◽  
The Past ◽  
Primary Documents ◽  
History Of ◽  
One Year ◽  
Successive Generations ◽  
Tradition Orale

Historians rarely pause to reflect on the history and theory of our own discipline, but it is a salutary exercise, particularly when the discipline is as young as African history. Twenty years ago a majority of African peoples emerged from colonial domination and acquired their independence. In that same year their history was also symbolically liberated from domination by the activities of Europeans in Africa through the inauguration of the Journal of African History. And one year later the new African history was given what was to become one of its dominant methodologies with the publication of Jan Vansina's De la tradition Orale.African history was to be the history of Africans, a history that had begun well before the European ‘discovery’ of Africa. The problem was sources. Western historiography was firmly based on written sources which could be arranged in sequence and analyzed to trace incremental changes and establish cause and effect relationships in evolutionary patterns of change. Unlike written documents which were recorded in the past and passed down unchanged into the present, oral traditions had to be remembered and retold through successive generations to reach the present. Their accuracy was thus subject to lapses in memory and falsification in the long chains of transmission from the initial report of the event in the past to the tradition told in the present. To overcome these problems Vansina established an elaborate and meticulous methodology by which traditions should be collected and transcribed, their chains of transmission traced and variants compared, and obvious biases and falsifications stripped off to produce primary documents suitable for writing history within the western genre.

Note on the Life of Francisco de Cárdenas Valencia

1945 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-29
Author(s):  
Eleanor B. Adams
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Important Work ◽  
Bibliographical Note ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Erroneous Belief ◽  
History Of

Very little has been known about the life of the seventeenth century Yucatecan historian, Francisco de Cárdenas Valencia, author of the Relación historial eclesiástica de la provincia de Yucatán. He completed this important work on the early colonial history of Yucatan in February, 1639, but although it was known and used by Diego López de Cogolludo and later historians, it remained unpublished for nearly three hundred years. In 1937 it was finally printed in the Biblioteca histórica mexicana de obras inéditas. In his bibliographical note to this edition, Federico Gómez de Orozco tells the history of the manuscript, refuting the erroneous belief that Cárdenas Valencia wrote two works, but he does not give much new data concerning its author.

The Regional Archive at Addi Qäyyeh, Eritrea

1998 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 423-425
Author(s):  
Irma Taddia
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
General Information ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Field Of Study ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Government

During the past few years of researching in Eritrea I had the chance to discover an important but little known source for the history of colonial Eritrea that the government that came to power in 1991 is evaluating: the regional archive of Addi Qäyyeh. This archive is in the main town of an area of the Eritrean highlands, Akkälä Guzay, and comprises a large number of documents on Italian colonialism. This documentation is exceptional; indeed, the great bulk of such documents remain in Italy, conserved in the unexploited Archivio Eritrea within the Ministerio degli Affari Esteri in Rome. To my knowledge the regional archive at Addi Qäyyeh is the only remaining colonial source in Eritrea, if we exclude some minor religious archives, and its interest is unquestionable.As noted, the main sources for colonial Eritrea are in Italy. The documents in the Archivio Eritrea amply testify to the importance of this material. This deals with colonial papers, inquiries, historical and geographical documentation, anthropological materials, and adminstrative papers—altogether, a large amount of material as yet little utilized by scholars. The colonial history of Eritrea remains in many respects a very poor field of study, and recent work has considered only a few documents in this rich collection. However, the Archivio Eritrea is not exhaustive—a complementary source offers a different set of materials amenable to historical study.Many documents preserved at Addi Qäyyeh have the same importance and share many subjects with those in Rome, while others are unique. Here I would just like to mention briefly some of the latter, and offer general information to intending historians of colonial Eritrea.

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