Category

Arms 2024-07-18

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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Cloth 2024-07-17

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 2024-07-17

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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