The mission

The research project explores 19th-century trajectories of three crucial trade items – arms, beads and cloth – in east-central Africa. Thanks to its cohesive intellectual agenda, interdisciplinary approach and broad geographical frame of reference, the project is expected to demonstrate the centrality of African societies and their material practices to global processes of production, exchange and consumption, rejecting the still common view that the Africans’ contribution to the rise of the modern global economy was limited to their role as “commodities” in the slave trade or as producers of raw materials for Western markets. The project has received funding from the European Union – Next Generation EU, PRIN Call 2022.

  • Arms unit
    Arms 18/07/2024
    A New History of Commodities: The Arms Trade in the Lower Congo in the 19th Century

    The history of the production and commerce of trade guns in the second half of the 19th century evokes an African centrality that most existing accounts of the growth of international economic integration have tended to obscure from view and reminds us that a focus on African consumer demand might…

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  • Nineteenth century Ethiopian shamma
    Cloth 17/07/2024
    Trans-continental threads: the trade in textiles in the nineteenth-century Horn of Africa

    In the second half of the nineteenth century, the inhabitants of Eastern Africa clothed themselves with textiles that came from many different places. There was, as in all pre-industrial societies, a lot of self-production, as households spun and weaved the cloth that they used themselves, and many exchanges took place…

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  • Beads as currency
    Beads 17/07/2024
    Glass Beads, African Consumers and Nineteenth Century Globalization

    That of the attraction of Africans for knick-knacks and objects of little value, accepted in exchange of valuable goods such as precious metals, ivory and enslaved human beings, was a widespread trope in the travelogues of European traders, missionaries and explorers since the fifteenth century. The quintessential objects of this…

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Participating institutions

This is a collaborative research project between the University of Bologna, the University of Pavia and Sapienza – University of Rome.
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