African Dominion

Download or read book African Dominion written by Michael A. Gomez and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking history that puts early and medieval West Africa in a global context Pick up almost any book on early and medieval world history and empire, and where do you find West Africa? On the periphery. This pioneering book, the first on this period of the region’s history in a generation, tells a different story. Interweaving political and social history and drawing on a rich array of sources, including Arabic manuscripts, oral histories, and recent archaeological findings, Michael Gomez unveils a new vision of how categories of ethnicity, race, gender, and caste emerged in Africa and in global history more generally. Scholars have long held that such distinctions arose during the colonial period, but Gomez shows they developed much earlier. Focusing on the Savannah and Sahel region, Gomez traces the exchange of ideas and influences with North Africa and the Central Islamic Lands by way of merchants, scholars, and pilgrims. Islam’s growth in West Africa, in tandem with intensifying commerce that included slaves, resulted in a series of political experiments unique to the region, culminating in the rise of empire. A major preoccupation was the question of who could be legally enslaved, which together with other factors led to the construction of new ideas about ethnicity, race, gender, and caste—long before colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. Telling a radically new story about early Africa in global history, African Dominion is set to be the standard work on the subject for many years to come.

Download or read book African Dominion written by Michael A. Gomez and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-27 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a radically new account of the importance of early Africa in global history, Gomez traces how Islam's growth in West Africa, along with intensifying commerce that included slaves, resulted in a series of political experiments unique to the region, culminating in the rise of empire.

Download or read book African Kings and Black Slaves written by Herman L. Bennett and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2018-09-10 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thought-provoking reappraisal of the first European encounters with Africa As early as 1441, and well before other European countries encountered Africa, small Portuguese and Spanish trading vessels were plying the coast of West Africa, where they conducted business with African kingdoms that possessed significant territory and power. In the process, Iberians developed an understanding of Africa's political landscape in which they recognized specific sovereigns, plotted the extent and nature of their polities, and grouped subjects according to their ruler. In African Kings and Black Slaves, Herman L. Bennett mines the historical archives of Europe and Africa to reinterpret the first century of sustained African-European interaction. These encounters were not simple economic transactions. Rather, according to Bennett, they involved clashing understandings of diplomacy, sovereignty, and politics. Bennett unearths the ways in which Africa's kings required Iberian traders to participate in elaborate diplomatic rituals, establish treaties, and negotiate trade practices with autonomous territories. And he shows how Iberians based their interpretations of African sovereignty on medieval European political precepts grounded in Roman civil and canon law. In the eyes of Iberians, the extent to which Africa's polities conformed to these norms played a significant role in determining who was, and who was not, a sovereign people—a judgment that shaped who could legitimately be enslaved. Through an examination of early modern African-European encounters, African Kings and Black Slaves offers a reappraisal of the dominant depiction of these exchanges as being solely mediated through the slave trade and racial difference. By asking in what manner did Europeans and Africans configure sovereignty, polities, and subject status, Bennett offers a new depiction of the diasporic identities that had implications for slaves' experiences in the Americas.

Download or read book The Golden Rhinoceros written by François-Xavier Fauvelle and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the birth of Islam in the seventh century to the voyages of European exploration in the fifteenth, Africa was at the center of a vibrant exchange of goods and ideas. It was an African golden age in which places like Ghana, Nubia, and Zimbabwe became the crossroads of civilizations, and where African royals, thinkers, and artists played celebrated roles in the globalized world of the Middle Ages. Drawing on fragmented written sources as well as his many years of experience as an archaeologist, the author reconstructs an African past that is too often denied its place in history. He looks at ruined cities found in the mangrove, exquisite pieces of art, rare artifacts like the golden rhinoceros of Mapungubwe, ancient maps, and accounts left by geographers and travelers

Download or read book Reversing Sail written by Michael A. Gomez and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-10 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Captures the essential political, cultural, social, and economic developments that shaped the black experience.

Download or read book Dominion of Race written by Laura Madokoro and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2017-06-09 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How has race shaped Canada’s international encounters and its role in the world? How have the actions of politicians, diplomats, citizens, and nongovernmental organizations reflected and reinforced racial power structures in Canada? In this book, leading scholars grapple with these complex questions, destabilizing conventional understandings of Canada in the world. Dominion of Race exposes how race-thinking has informed priorities and policies, positioned Canada in the international community, and contributed to a global order rooted in racial beliefs. While the contributors reconsider familiar topics, including the Paris Peace Conference and Canada’s involvement with the United Nations, they enlarge the scope of Canada’s international history by subject, geography, and methodology. By demonstrating that race is a fundamental component of Canada and its international history, this important book calls for reengagement with the histories of those marginalized in, or excluded from, the historical record.

Download or read book Vanguard written by Martha S. Jones and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The epic history of African American women's pursuit of political power -- and how it transformed America. In the standard story, the suffrage crusade began in Seneca Falls in 1848 and ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. But this overwhelmingly white women's movement did not win the vote for most black women. Securing their rights required a movement of their own. In Vanguard, acclaimed historian Martha S. Jones offers a new history of African American women's political lives in America. She recounts how they defied both racism and sexism to fight for the ballot, and how they wielded political power to secure the equality and dignity of all persons. From the earliest days of the republic to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and beyond, Jones excavates the lives and work of black women -- Maria Stewart, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Fannie Lou Hamer, and more -- who were the vanguard of women's rights, calling on America to realize its best ideals.