Book by Cooper, Frederick, Isaacman, Allen F.

Confronting Historical Paradigms: Peasants, Labor, and the Capitalist World System in Africa and Latin America

Business & Money

Cooper, Frederick

Isaacman, Allen F.

Economics

Univ of Wisconsin Pr

Confronting Historical Paradigms argues that confrontation with major paradigms of world history has marked the fields of African and Latin American history during the last quarter-century, and that the process has dramatically restructured historical and theoretical understanding of peasantries, labor, and the capitalist world system. Moreover, it maintains, the intellectual reverberations within and across the African and Latin American fields constitute a challenging and underappreciated counterpoint to laments that contemporary historical knowledge has suffered a splintering so extreme that it undermines larger dialogue and meaning. The authors, in their substantive essays, synthesize, order, and evaluate the significance of the enormous resonating literatures that have come to exist for Africa and Latin America on the themes of the capitalist world system, labor, and peasantries. They historicize these literatures by analyzing an entire cycle of critical dialogue and confrontation with historical paradigms and the professional upheavals that accompanied them. They review the initial confrontations with frameworks of historical knowledge that erupted in the 1960s and the early 1970s; the emergence of new “dissident” paradigms; the outpouring of subsequent scholarship on peasants, labor, and capitalism that began to unravel the newly proposed paradigms by the 1980s and 1990s; and the outlines of the new interpretive frameworks that tended to displace both the “traditional” and “early dissident” paradigms. They also suggest possible outlines of a new cycle of “Third World” confrontations with paradigm, anchored in themes such as gender and ethnicity. Confronting Historical Paradigms employs a historicized awareness of intellectual networks, conversations, and history–theory dialogues. The result is a critical analysis and synthetic presentation of substantive advances that have preoccupied scholarship on Africa and Latin America in recent decades and a powerful challenge to notions that “new” fields of history have ended up destroying intellectual coherence and community.

Confronting Historical Paradigms: Peasants, Labor, And The Capitalist World System

University of Wisconsin Press

Based on extensive research, and drawing on a wide range of sources, including local documents and interviews with descendants of both slaves and slaveowners, Cooper reconstructs the plantation economy of the East African coast and its effects on slaves. His work is intelligent, quite readable, and broadly comparative, as he relates the regional variations in slave systems along the coast and sets them beside forms of slavery

Plantation slavery on the east coast of Africa (Yale historical publications : Miscellany)

History

Historical Study & Educational Resources

Yale University Press

Cooper's subtle and seminal work examines the critical decades of transition from a slave-based plantation system in East Africa to a colonial economy based on wage labor. While British officials hoped to create an efficient and productive class of agrarian workers, the original Arab and Swahili landlords and slaveowners tried to redefine their old mechanisms of domination in order to maintain them. Yet the ex-slaves themselves had a quite different agenda: to acquire access to land on their own terms, and to shape their own working conditions. The processes of interaction and struggle among these three groups shaped the outlines of social and economic development along the Swahili coast through the remainder of the twentieth century. Cooper's comparative analysis is penetrating, and his book retains a central position in historical scholarship.

From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890-1925

Yale Univ Pr

A study of work in the European-African colonial relationship during the first half of the 20th century. Labor relations became increasingly tense during the 1940s due to a rising urban working class, and this book examines this phenomenon by focusing on African dockworkers.

On the African Waterfront: Urban Disorder and the Transformation of Work in Colonial Mombasa

Starting with the premise that Europe was made by its imperial projects as much as colonial encounters were shaped by events and conflicts in Europe, the contributors to Tensions of Empire investigate metropolitan-colonial relationships from a new perspective. The fifteen essays demonstrate various ways in which "civilizing missions" in both metropolis and colony provided new sites for clarifying a bourgeois order. Focusing on the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, they show how new definitions of modernity and welfare were developed and how new discourses and practices of inclusion and exclusion were contested and worked out. The contributors argue that colonial studies can no longer be confined to the units of analysis on which it once relied; instead of being the study of "the colonized," it must account for the shifting political terrain on which the very categories of colonized and colonizer have been shaped and patterned at different times.

Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World

Stoler, Ann Laura

Americas

University of California Press

During the past fifty years, colonial empires around the world have collapsed and vast areas that were once known as "colonies" have become known as "less developed countries" or "the third world." The idea of development―and the relationship it implies between industrialized, affluent nations and poor, emerging nations―has become the key to a new conceptual framework. Development has also become a vast industry, involving billions of dollars and a worldwide community of experts. These essays―written by scholars in many fields―examine the production, transmission, and implementation of ideas about development within historical, political, and intellectual contexts, emphasizing the changing meanings of development over the past fifty years. The concept of development has come under attack in recent years both from those who see development as the imperialism of knowledge, imposing on the world a modernity that it does not necessarily want, and those who see development efforts as a distortion of the world market. These essays look beyond the polemics and focus on the diverse, contested, and changing meanings of development among social movements, national governments, international agencies, foundations, and scholars.

International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge

Packard, Randall M.

In this closely integrated collection of essays on colonialism in world history, Frederick Cooper raises crucial questions about concepts relevant to a wide range of issues in the social sciences and humanities, including identity, globalization, and modernity. Rather than portray the past two centuries as the inevitable movement from empire to nation-state, Cooper places nationalism within a much wider range of imperial and diasporic imaginations, of rulers and ruled alike, well into the twentieth century. He addresses both the insights and the blind spots of colonial studies in an effort to get beyond the tendency in the field to focus on a generic colonialism located sometime between 1492 and the 1960s and somewhere in the "West." Broad-ranging, cogently argued, and with a historical focus that moves from Africa to South Asia to Europe, these essays, most published here for the first time, propose a fuller engagement in the give-and-take of history, not least in the ways in which concepts usually attributed to Western universalism—including citizenship and equality—were defined and reconfigured by political mobilizations in colonial contexts.

Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History

Africa

In this closely integrated collection of essays on colonialism in world history, Frederick Cooper raises crucial questions about concepts relevant to a wide range of issues in the social sciences and humanities, including identity, globalization, and modernity. Rather than portray the past two centuries as the inevitable movement from empire to nation-state, Cooper places nationalism within a much wider range of imperial and diasporic imaginations, of rulers and ruled alike, well into the twentieth century. He addresses both the insights and the blind spots of colonial studies in an effort to get beyond the tendency in the field to focus on a generic colonialism located sometime between 1492 and the 1960s and somewhere in the "West." Broad-ranging, cogently argued, and with a historical focus that moves from Africa to South Asia to Europe, these essays, most published here for the first time, propose a fuller engagement in the give-and-take of history, not least in the ways in which concepts usually attributed to Western universalism―including citizenship and equality―were defined and reconfigured by political mobilizations in colonial contexts.

This authoritative volume changes our conceptions of "imperial" and "African" history. Frederick Cooper gathers a vast range of archival sources to achieve a truly comparative study of colonial policy toward African labor forces. He shows how African trade union and political leaders used the new language of social change to claim equality and a share of power. In the end, Britain and France could not reshape African society. As they left the continent, the question was how they had affected the ways in which Africans could reorganize society themselves.

Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (African Studies, Series Number 89)

Cambridge University Press

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Books by Cooper, Frederick

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Cooper, Frederick. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Confronting Historical Paradigms: Peasants, Labor, and the Capitalist World System in Africa and Latin America

Confronting Historical Paradigms: Peasants, Labor, And The Capitalist World System

Plantation slavery on the east coast of Africa (Yale historical publications : Miscellany)

From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890-1925

On the African Waterfront: Urban Disorder and the Transformation of Work in Colonial Mombasa

Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World

International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge

Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History

Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History

Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (African Studies, Series Number 89)