Jan-Georg Deutsch

Introduction: Labour in Transport: Histories from the Global South (Africa, Asia, and Latin America), c.1750 to 1950

This introduction highlights the main subjects and research questions addressed in the articles making up this Special Issue on the labour histories of transport in the Global South. Although historiographical interest in the history of transport labour is growing, scientific knowledge on the subject is still very limited. This is especially true for histories from outside Europe and North America. Important topics and research problems covered here are: (1) transport labour as facilitating the exchange and mobility of goods but also of peoples and ideas – as such transport constitutes a noteworthy element of social history; (2) transport labour as a factor of production which is relevant for industrial and agrarian societies, as well as for market-driven and socialist economies; (3) the extent to which the processes of globalization, imperial expansion, and the emergence of global capitalism owe a debt to transport labour of the global south and its micro-histories.

Introduction Control and excess: Histories of violence in Africa

Violence is a murky issue to research and to theorize: this introduction suggests that it has also often been approached differently by anthropologists and historians. In the pages that follow, we reflect on the ways in which both disciplines have worked to interpret violent events in Africa, whether in the deep past, during the colonial era or in more recent periods. To better contextualize these disciplinary advances, we intersperse them with brief reviews of general theories on violence. The three articles featured in this special section, while dealing with very dissimilar case studies, provide common insights on three main themes. The first engages with the paradox of the contingency and continuity of violence, and with the unevenness of perpetrators, victims and targets. The second deals with the refractive meanings attached to violent events. The third probes, underneath the apparent turmoil of violent acts, the deep moral and cultural frameworks of action that underwrite them. We have composed this introduction around these main questions.

African modernities : entangled meanings in current debate

Introduction: cherished visions & entangled meanings by Jan-Georg Deutsch, Peter Probst & Heike Schmidt - West Africa: modernity & modernization by Richard Rathbone - Kenyatta, God & the modern world by John Lonsdale - Dislocation, memory & modernity: the prophet Isaiah Shembe and the search for voice & space by Liz Gunner - Images of an African modernity: the Likoni Ferry photographers of Mombasa, Kenya by Heike Behrend - Governmentality, materiality, legality, modernity: on the colonial state in Africa by John Comaroff - Reason, modernity & the African crisis by Simon Gikandi - Modernization theory, modernization & African modernities: an outsiders view by Wolfgang Knobl