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“Slavery in Africa: Past, Heritage, Present”

The organizing committee of the international conference, “Slavery in Africa: Past, Heritage, Present” are inviting all interested researchers to submit paper or panel proposals. The conference will be held in Nairobi, Kenya from October 27-29, 2014.

This international conference seeks to mark a significant moment in the reactivation and intensification of research on slavery in Africa. The conference will look at all types of sources, – oral, written and audio-visual, – with a particular focus on the collection and analysis of testimonies by slaves and their descendants. Moreover, the conference aims to promote a better understanding of the links between African slavery and different slave trades, which have been studied extensively in African historiography.

For more details, click here or download the flyer.

[Conference] Indian Women within Indentured Labour in Mauritius in the Nineteenth Century

Announcing confernce “Indian Women within Indentured Labour in Mauritius in the Nineteenth Century”

by Lorna Mungur, MA Student, Indian Ocean World Centre, McGill University

Wednesday, 30 October 2013, 116 Peterson Hall, 4:45 pm

Following the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, Indian indentured labourers migrated to Mauritius to work within the plantation economy of the island. Approximately 453,000 indentured labourers migrated to the island between 1834 and 1920. The focus of this paper is Indian women in Mauritius at the time of indentureship. Women’s social positions were defined by their role as wives and mothers, and colonial legislation on Indian marriages legally defined women as the subordinate of their husbands. Indian women’s position within nineteenth-century colonial Mauritian society illustrates that work was not synonymous with liberation; women relied on relationships with men to access social and economic capital. Thus, migration did not create new opportunities; rather it enforced women’s inferiority and dependence on their male counterparts within the colonial landscape, reaffirming patriarchal control over Indian women. Hence, this paper argues that Indian women’s opportunities in Mauritius lay in marriage, not in work, creating a state of dependency where women had to rely socially, economically and legally on men.

The Demography of Disasters: Implications for Future Policy on Development and Resilience

The Demography of Disasters:

Implications for Future Policy on Development and Resilience

 

Australian National University

18–20 September 2013

Download full program

By exploring how mortality caused by natural disasters impacts on women, men, children, the elderly and people with disabilities, the conference aims:
1. to contribute to more cost-effective government policies on disaster mitigation, preparedness and recovery for vulnerable populations;

2. to make the latest cultural and cross-cultural research on disaster mitigation, preparedness and recovery available to representatives from disaster impacted countries with a view to this material being incorporated in public policy;

3. to enable Disaster Risk Reduction practitioners among civil society groups who have daily operational interaction with disaster-impacted communities to come together to share their knowledge and experience with a view to opening dialogue on improved approaches to development and resilience among vulnerable, often poverty-stricken, populations;

4. to explore how access to social capital in family and kinship networks, land and assets influence survival rates and adaptive behaviors after a disaster; and

5. to examine the impact of migration into and out of disaster-affected areas and what are the long-term socio-economic impacts of these migration flows on individuals and population groups.

Forthcoming events

Members of the IOW project will participate in the following events. More information will be added as soon as it comes.

Abolitions et esclavages : Historiographies et regards croisés

Dans le cadre du séminaire d’Alessandro Stanziani et Christian Lamouroux “Marchés, Institutions, Savoirs. Amérique, Afro-Eurasie, Histoires Connectées” la séance du lundi 13 mai 2103 sera consacrée au thème “Abolitions et esclavages : Historiographies et regards croisés
Date et lieu : Lundi 13 mai 2013, de 9h30 à 13h, EHESS 190 avenue de France, salle 2
Programme :
-Lara Kriegel, Associate Professor of History and English, Indiana University, Associate Editor, American Historical Review
Commemoration and the Humanitarian Sentiment: Abolition and its Afterlife in the British Empire
-Jean-Frédric Schaub, EHESS
Sur le “temps long” de la formation des catégories raciales en Occident.
-Alex Lichtenstein, Directeur d’études invité, EHESS, Associate Professor of History, Indiana University
US Slavery, Abolition & Emancipation: Historiography and Debates
-Claude Chevaleyre, EHESS
L’abolition de l’esclavage en Chine en 1910.
Commentateurs :
-Alessandro Stella (CNRS, CRH)
-Alessandro Stanziani

Past Events of Isabelle Guérin

Isabelle Guérin has participated in 2011 and 2012 to the following events:

  • Debt, hierarchy and modernity in rural South-India“, symposium Crisis, Value and Hope: Rethinking the Economy, University of Barcelona/University of Amsterdam, 14-20 September 2012, Sintra (Portugal).
  • “Changes and continuities in the labour landscape in Tamil Nadu”, Capitalism and Development in the 21st Century, at the University of Oxford (Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology), 4-5 Juillet 2012.
  • She has participated in The Bonds of Migration: Debt, Interdependence and Mobility, Chicago Centre in Paris, 19-20th Decembre 2011, Paris.

Journée d’étude : Travail, coercition et croissance économique en Eurasie, XVIIe-XXe siècles, EHESS, 8 février 2012

Travail, coercition et croissance économique en Eurasie, XVIIe-XXe siècles.

EHESS, 190 avenue de France, 75013, Salle 638, Vendredi 8 février 2012, 9,30-13 heures

A l’occasion de la parution de l’ouvrage Labour, Coercion and Growth in Eurasia, 17th-20th centuries, Leiden, Brill, 2012 (sous la direction de Alessandro Stanziani)

L’histoire des formes du travail “libre” est étroitement liée à celle du travail forcé. Les cas de la Russie, de l’Indonésie néerlandaise, de l’Inde et de l’Océan indien sont discutés en relation avec ceux du Japon, de la Chine, de la France et de l’Angleterre. Dans tous ces cas, les formes du travail répondent non seulement à la circulation de modèles, institutions et pratiques du travail, mais aussi aux dynamiques globales des marchés. Entre le XVIIe et le début du XXe siècle, la proto-industrie, l’agriculture, le commerce et la manufacture connaissent une croissance sans précédents dans les principales régions d’Asie et d’Europe. Cette croissance fortement intensive en travail exerce une pression accrue sur les ressources en travail et contribue à accroître la coercition. Ce processus ne s’arrête pas avec la première révolution industrielle, mais bien plus tard, au tournant du XIXe et du XXe siècle, avec la deuxième révolution industrielle et l’essor de l’État social.

Intervenants

  • Alessandro Stanziani, EHESS (CRH) et CNRS, Introduction. Travail, contrainte et croissance économique.
  • Claude Markovits (CNRS, EHESS, Centre d’études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud), The circulation of commercial manpower in an Indian worldwide trading network in the early twentieth century
  • Claude Chevaleyre, EHESS, Centre Chine, Corée, Japon, Acting as Master and Bondservant. Considerations on Status Identities and the Nature of “Bond-servitude” in Late Ming China.
  • Ulbe Bosma, IISG, Amsterdam, Dutch Imperial Anxieties About Free Labour, Penal Sanctions and the Right to Strike.
  • Pierre Vernus, Lahra, Lyon, Les relations contractuelles, les tarifs et les usages dans l’industrie de la soie à Lyon au XIXe siècle.

Discutants:

  • Christian Lamouroux, EHESS, Centre Chine, Corée, Japon
  • Marcel van der Linden, IISG, Amsterdam

Contacts et informations: Alessandro.stanziani@ehess.fr