No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Scholarly work on the transatlantic slave trade has tended to focus on the volume, conditions and the profits of this hideous commerce and its demographic, economic and social impact on the coastal areas of Atlantic Africa. Much has therefore been published about the history of specific ports and coastal regions, but still little is known about the contribution of the slave trade to the overall formation and shaping of the Atlantic Africa port system and its regional port subsystems , the links between various ports, their commercial struggles, and the variable factors that conditioned changes in their role within the system. This study will partly address these issues by examining how the slave trade, in conjunction with other local, regional and international economic and political dynamics, contributed to the rise and fall of ports in Atlantic Africa and helped shape its port system. In doing so, the analysis is based on shipping information gathered from the TransAtlantic Slave Trade Database, and on the specific literature on various slave ports in Atlantic Africa.

This introduction explains why it is important to include the history of labor and labor relations in Africa in Global Labor History. It suggests that the approach of the Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations 1500–2000 – with its taxonomy of labor relations – is a feasible method for applying this approach to the historiography on labor history in Africa. The introduction ends with an analysis of four case studies that are presented in this special section, with a specific focus on shifts in labor relations and how they could be explained.

This article examines the main changes in the policies of the Portuguese state in relation to Mozambique and its labour force during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, stemming from political changes within the Portuguese Empire (i.e. the independence of Brazil in 1821), the European political scene (i.e. the Berlin Conference, 1884-1885), and the Southern African context (i.e. the growing British, French, and German presence). By becoming a principle mobilizer and employer of labour power in the territory, an allocator of labour to neighbouring colonial states, and by granting private companies authority to play identical roles, the Portuguese state brought about important shifts in labour relations in Mozambique. Slave and tributary labour were replaced by new forms of indentured labour (initially termed serviçais and latter contratados) and forced labour (compelidos). The period also saw an increase in commodified labour in the form of wage labour (voluntários), selfemployment among peasant and settler farmers, and migrant labour to neighbouring colonies.

Challenging current ideas in mainstream scholarship on differences between female labour force participation in southern and north-western Europe and their impact on economic development, this article shows that in Portugal, neither marriage nor widowhood prevented women from participating in the labour market of mid-eighteenth-century. Our research demonstrates that marriage provided women with the resources they needed to work in various capacities in all economic sectors.This article also argues that single Portuguese women had an incentive to work and did so mostly as wage earners. Finally, the comparison of our dataset on female occupations from tax records with other European cases calls for a revision of the literature and the development of a more nuanced picture of the north-south divide.

No abstract