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73155 results in African studies

Page 39 of 3658

  • Chapter 4 - On the Origins of Western Freedom and Development

  • Warren C. Whatley, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  • Book:
    Slavery, Freedom, and Development
    Published online:
    29 January 2026
    Print publication:
    19 January 2026, pp 56-81

  • Summary

    This chapter focuses on the historical relationship between Western slavery, Western freedom, and Western development. It notes the silence of economic historians on the question and then evaluates the hypotheses found in the writings of sociologist Orlando Patterson. Preliminary data suggest that freedom from slavery spread in Western Europe during the marriage of church and state in the Carolingian Empire (circa 751-935 AD), and was declared sinful among Christians throughout Christendom beginning in the thirteenth century, precisely when European economies started their long march to the Industrial Revolution. Within Christendom, the practice of ransoming prisoners, rather than enslaving them, became so “democratized” that many recruits could essentially insure against slaughter or the permanence of capture. Outside Christendom, slave trading and slavery flourished, especially in the Atlantic. Western European Empires (the Dutch, English, French, and Spanish) had the best of both worlds: freedom dividends at home fed by the products of slaves exploited offshore.

  • Figures

  • Peter Lockwood, University of Manchester
  • Book:
    Peasants to Paupers
    Published online:
    24 December 2025
    Print publication:
    19 January 2026, pp viii-viii
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  • 7 - ‘There is only starting at the bottom’

  • Peter Lockwood, University of Manchester
  • Book:
    Peasants to Paupers
    Published online:
    24 December 2025
    Print publication:
    19 January 2026, pp 205-225
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  • Summary

    Chapter 7 describes the fortunes of Mwaura three years on from the original fieldwork. It draws attention to heightened anxieties about social breakdown illuminated by the author’s host family’s own breaking apart, and two deaths – one of a neighbourhood youth, and another of a neighbourhood elder, the same young man’s father. This ethnographic epilogue crystallises key issues brought out throughout the book: male struggles with alcoholism, anxieties about downward social mobility, the damaging effects of family breakdown, and contestation over landed futures.

  • Beyond the urban–rural divide: urban duration, rural connections, and sociopolitical (re)orientation in Kenya

  • Amanda Lea Robinson, Rachel Beatty Riedl
  • Journal:
    The Journal of Modern African Studies / Volume 63 / Issue 4 / December 2025
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    12 January 2026, pp. 241-261
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  • While Africa’s rapid urbanisation is expected to transform many aspects of political, economic and social life, decades of Africanist research shows that urban migration rarely severs rural ties. Building on this tradition, we use original survey data from 472 residents of Nairobi, Kenya, to examine how multiple forms of rural connection vary with urban duration and urban (re)orientation. We conceptualise four analytically distinct linkages – direct personal contact, provision of material support, anticipation of a rural safety net and spiritual connection – and measure each within a single empirical framework. We find that rural linkages do not diminish over time among first-generation migrants, but do decline across generations, with spiritual ties being especially persistent. Strong rural linkages are generally associated with weaker integration into urban social and political life. By disaggregating rural–urban connections and situating them in the temporal dynamics of urban residence, this article clarifies when and how African urbanisation transforms social and political orientations and provides a framework for cross-city and cross-country comparison.

  • Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and the Writing of Political Freedom

  • Brendon Nicholls
  • Journal:
    African Studies Review / Volume 69 / Issue 1 / March 2026
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    12 January 2026, pp. 176-180
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Crude Calculations
  • Regime Stability, Economic Liberalization, and the Energy Transition
  • Oliver McPherson-Smith
  • Published online:
    08 January 2026
    Print publication:
    19 February 2026
  • Crude Calculations charts a ground-breaking link between autocratic regime stability and economic liberalization amid the global transition to lower-carbon energy sources. It introduces the rent-conditional reform theory to explain how preserving regime stability constrains economic liberalization in resource-wealthy autocracies and hybrid-regimes. Using comparative case studies of Nigeria and Saudi Arabia, the book traces almost one hundred years of political and legal history to provide a framework for understanding the future of economic liberalization in fossil fuel-rich autocracies. Drawing from archival documents and contemporary interviews, this book explains how natural resource rents are needed to placate threats to regime stability and argues that, contrary to conventional literature, non-democratic, resource-wealthy regimes liberalize their economies during commodity booms and avoid liberalization during downturns. Amid the global energy transition, Crude Calculations details the future political challenges to economic liberalization in fossil fuel-rich autocracies—and why autocracies rich in battery minerals may pursue economic liberalization.

  • The Orienting Work of “Culture” and Africa-China as Method

  • Vivian Chenxue Lu, Mingwei Huang
  • Journal:
    African Studies Review , First View
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    08 January 2026, pp. 1-24
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  • This essay problematizes the place of “culture” in Africa-China studies whereby culture is often sidelined as the devalued supplement to political-economic data. Instead, cultural narratives and processes are inseparable from how knowledge and Africa-China relationality are made. We consider how multi-directional reflexivity about the production of a knowledge object (“Africa-China/China-Africa”) intervenes in both outdated forms of Cold War-inflected area studies and emergent hawkish nationalist scholarship. This essay considers Africa-China as method, an approach based in transregional theorizing and relational analysis that attends to the politics of knowledge production and resists instrumentalization of scholarly findings by imperialist or ethnonationalist agendas.

  • Ahmed Nara’s Fatal Mission

  • Aliko Songolo
  • Journal:
    African Studies Review / Volume 68 / Issue 4 / December 2025
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    08 January 2026, pp. 851-856
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Photography and Film in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee
  • Hermann Wittenberg
  • Published online:
    07 January 2026
    Print publication:
    19 February 2026
  • Speaking about his early experiments with the camera, the Nobel Prize winning novelist J. M. Coetzee acknowledged the seminal influence of images on his writing: 'The marks of photography and of the cinema are all over my work, from the beginning.' This book presents an archivally grounded examination of the influence of the camera on Coetzee's creative practice, providing insights that can help us read the novels in new ways. In this comprehensive examination of the formative role that photographic images play in Coetzee's oeuvre, Wittenberg offers evidence from biographical and archival sources, Coetzee's own critical writings, and the whole range of fictions themselves to gauge the extent of Coetzee's visual imagination. This book argues that the images that Coetzee writes into his fictions are charged with an affective and ethical force that connects them to larger questions relating to the truth, a relationship in which the autobiographical self is implicated.

Page 39 of 3658