Lecture series in African and Global History 2023-2024
ECC is proud to convene its first Lectures series in African and Global History for the academic year 2023-2024.
This academic year the series consists of seven lectures, delivered by scholars with celebrated expertise in their respective fields.
Each lecture takes place in Auditorium Vandenhove (Rozier 1, next to the Book Tower, 9000 Ghent), on selected Thursdays from 14h00 to 16h00.
The series is co-funded by the Ghent Centre for Global Studies.
Administrative cooperation from Amber Frateur.
For contact: Samuel.Coghe@ugent.be
12 October 2023:
Mariana Candido (Emory University)
Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola: A history of dispossession, slavery, and inequality
Exploring the multifaceted history of dispossession, consumption,and inequality in West Central Africa, Mariana Candido presents a revisionist history of Angola from the sixteenth century until the Berlin Conference of 1884–85. She demonstrates how ideas about dominion and land rights informed the appropriation and enslavement of free people and their labor. By centering the experiences of West Central Africans, and especially African women, this book challenges dominant historical narratives and shows that securing property was a gendered process. Drawing attention to how archives obscure African forms of knowledge and normalize conquest, Candido interrogates simplistic interpretations of ownership and pushes for the decolonization of African history.
Mariana P. Candido is the Winship Distinguished Research Professor of History at Emory University and the Nina Maria Gorrissen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Fall 2023. Prof. Candido is a specialist in West Central African history during the era of the transatlantic slave trade. She has also authored An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World: Benguela and its Hinterland (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and is co-editor of the journal African Economic History.
26 October 2023
Tomás Bartoletti (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zürich)
Towards a Multispecies History of Capitalism Economic Entomology and the Expansion of Ecological Frontiers, circa 1880—1930
By reassessing the development of pest control research in the tropical world between c. 1880 and 1930, Tomás will examine the interlocking of agricultural economics in processes of multispecies territorialization and imperial capitalism. During this period, the propagation of insect pests beyond imperial and state borders challenged the cost-effective exploitation of tropical raw materials.A branch of the scientific study of insects, economic entomology,was intensively applied to improve land use, becoming a prominent field in global scientific research. Tomás’ project focuses on the role of European entomologists expanding the ecological frontier and profit aspirations through commodification processes in Latin America, East Africa, the Middle East and the Pacific Islands. The global circulation of knowledge about pest control has transformed socioecological dynamics in these regions, and also powerfully shaped the model of agricultural production both in tropical lands and in the European context until our times.
(in collaboration with the Sarton Centre for History of Science)
Tomás Bartoletti is Senior Lecturer at the Chair for History of the Modern World of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich. His current project “Insect Pests and Economic Entomology in Plantations, c. 1870–1930s: A Multispecies History of Global Capitalism” is granted by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
29 February 2024
Morgan Robinson (Mississippi State University)
A language for the world: The standardization of Swahili
[Abstract TBA]
14 March 2024
Ulbe Bosma (International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam)
The world of sugar: How the histories of sugar and capitalism are linked
For most of history, humans did without refined sugar. After all, it serves no necessary purpose in our diets, and extracting it from plants takes hard work and ingenuity. Hence, sugar remained marginal in the diets of most people for a long time. Then, suddenly, it was everywhere. How did sugar find its way into almost all the food we eat, fostering illness and ecological crisis along the way?
Presenting his newest publication, The World of Sugar: How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environment over 2,000 Years(Harvard University Press, 2023), Professor Bosma will discuss the earliest evidence of sugar production and explain how traders brought small quantities of precious white crystals to rajahs, emperors, and caliphs during the Middle Ages. Later, when European consumers discovered the sweet stuff, increasing demand spawned a brutal quest for supply, based on enslaved labor. Two-thirds of the 12.5 million Africans taken across the Atlantic were destined for sugar plantations. By the twentieth century, sugar had become a major source of calories in diets across Europe and North America. Sugar has been at the heart of capitalism, and this goes a long way in explaining why it poses such a threat to our bodies, our environment, and our communities.
Ulbe Bosma is Senior Researcher at the International Institute of Social History and Professor of International Comparative Social History at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He has published widely on colonial and postcolonial history, commodity production, migration, and slavery, particularly on the Dutch colonial empire. His books include The World of Sugar How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environment over 2,000 Years (Harvard University Press, 2023), The Making of a Periphery (Columbia University Press, 2019) and The Sugar Plantation in India and Indonesia (Cambridge University Press, 2013). He is member of the coordinating team of the global network Commodity Frontiers Initiative.
21 March 2024
Kalle Kananoja (University of Oulu)
From African medicinals to global pharmaceuticals: Lusoafrican trajectories, 18th century – present
How have African medical knowledge and medicinals been exported and marketed outside of Africa? How have herbal home remedies been developed into pharmaceutical products? What are the historical contours and current prospects of global interaction and co-operation in these undertakings? Despite the potential of harnessing African genetic resources for medicinal plant and pharmaceutical trade, the continent continues to be a minor player in the global market for these products. As local markets tend to focus on selling unprocessed materia medica and the industry remains informal and diffuse, only a limited number of plant species garner international interest.
Taking eighteenth-century Angola and Mozambique as starting points, and engaging with recent historiography about African plant medicines, this paper demonstrates the role played by dynamic and mobile cross-cultural medical encounters in Lusoafrican contexts and identifies lacunae to be addressed in future research. Discussing the sustained but modest scientific attention and commercial interest given to African phytotherapies and vernacular knowledge during Portuguese colonial rule, this paper notes that the prospects for heightened development of Lusoafrican pharmaceutical industries seem to lie in South-South co-operation rather than neglectful North-South relationships.
Kalle Kananoja is a Finnish historian with a background in African and (southern) Atlantic studies, and work (since August 2021) as a lecturer in History of Science and Ideas at University of Oulu. His research focuses on social, cultural and intellectual histories of slavery, religion and medicine. His book Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2021; included on the ALA’s Choice list of outstanding academic titles 2022) analyses continuous knowledge exchanges and perceptions of health, disease and healing in West Central and West Africa in the early modern period. Kananoja co-edited Healers and Empires in Global History (Springer 2019), which explores cross-cultural medical encounters and the intertwined and plural medical histories involving non-Western healers from the Arctic, Asia, Africa, Americas and the Caribbean.
28 March 2024
David Mwambari (KU Leuven)
The politics of vernacular memory in post-colonial African contexts
This lecture will explore the evolution of memory politics in post-colonial Africa over the last two decades. Societies take different paths when coming to terms with violent pasts. Some undertake active commemorations (e.g., rituals, memorials, and ceremonies), while others elect for silence, forgetting uncomfortable memories or remembering privately through vernacular platforms for many reasons. These memories and silences interact in public—in national, regional, and international politics. They shape the memory politics of the past and modern lived experiences as societies negotiate transitions. The influence peace and (in)security for these societies and beyond. This lecture will draw on empirical examples from research in postwar states in East, Central, and West Africa and beyond.
David Mwambari is an associate professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium and the principal investigator for the European Research Council (ERC)-funded TMSS project. He is core faculty and a board member at the Oxford Consortium on Human Rights, University of Oxford.
Previously, he was an assistant professor of African Security and Leadership Studies in the African Leadership Centre at King’s College (UK), an FWO postdoctoral research fellow with the Conflict Research Group at Ghent University (Belgium), and an assistant professor of International Relations at the United States International University–Africa in Nairobi, Kenya. Professor Mwambari was also a fellow at Churchill College, University of Cambridge (UK), African Academic Diaspora Fellow at The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (Senegal), and a visiting professor at Mackenzie University in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
18 April 2024
Nicole Eggers (University of Tennesse-Knoxville)
Unruly ideas: Kitawala, everyday intellectuals, and power in Congolese history
This talk will explore the multifaceted history of the Congolese religious movement Kitawala, which has roots in the African Watchtower (Jehovah’s Witness) movement. Drawing on a rich body of original oral, ethnographic, and archival research, Nicole Eggers will consider how the history of Kitawala illuminates the complex relationship between politics, religion, healing, and violence in Congo, offering important insight into the work of everyday intellectuals in 20th century central African history. More than a case study of a particular religious movement, the talk will investigate how communities and individuals in the region have historically imagined power, sought to access it, wielded it, and policed the morality of its uses.
Nicole Eggers is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee. Her research interests include 20th-21st Century Congolese history, health and healing, refugees, and religion and politics in Central Africa.