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"Exploring the multifaceted history of dispossession, consumption, and inequality in West Central Africa, Mariana P. Candido presents a bold revisionist history of Angola from the sixteenth century until the Berlin Conference of 1884-5. Synthesising disparate strands of scholarship, including the histories of slavery, land tenure, and gender in West Central Africa, Candido makes a significant contribution to ongoing historical debates. She demonstrates how ideas about dominion and land rights eventually came to inform the appropriation and enslavement of free people and their labour. By centring 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"--
List of contents
List of maps and plans; List of illustrations; List of tables and graph; Acknowledgments; A note on currency; Introduction: a history of ownership, dispossession, and inequality; 1. Who owned what? Early debate over land rights and dispossession; 2. Property rights in the nineteenth century; 3. Written records and gendered strategies to secure property; 4. Commodification of human beings; 5. Branded in freedom: the persistent commodification of people; 6. The erasure of communal rights; 7. Global consumers: West Central Africans and the accumulation of things; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.
About the author
Mariana P. Candido is Associate Professor at Emory University and a specialist on West Central African history, 1500–1880. Her publications include An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World (2013), African Women in the Atlantic World (co-edited 2019), and Crossing Memories (co-edited 2011).
Summary
Mariana Candido explores the history of dispossession, consumption, and inequality in Angola from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Centring the experiences of West Central Africans, and particularly African women, Candido advances the push to decolonize African history.
