Arms, Beads and Cloth. African Consumers and the 19th-century Global Economy

Areas: African History; Global History; Economic History

Abstract:
The research project “Arms, Beads and Cloth. African Consumers and the 19th-century Global Economy” explores 19th-century trajectories of three crucial trade items – arms, beads and cloth – in a vast region of east-central Africa to demonstrate the centrality of African societies and their material practices to global processes of production, exchange and consumption. Rejecting the still common view that the Africans’ contribution to the rise of the modern global economy was limited to their role as “commodities” in the slave trade or as producers of raw materials for Western markets, the project casts the spotlight on African consumer demand. Thanks to its cohesive intellectual agenda, interdisciplinary approach and broad geographical frame of reference, the project is expected to illuminate the agency of African consumers in driving global processes of production and trade and to make a case for regarding African networks of exchange and consumption as nodal points of global intersection.

Duration of the project: 28/09/2023 – 28/09/2025

Principal investigator: Karin Pallaver

Partnership: University of Pavia La Sapienza – University of Rome

Budget of the University of Bologna: 64.943

EUR ERC sectors: 1. SH6_11 Global history, transnational history, comparative history, entangled histories 2. SH6_12 Social and economic history 3. SH6_9 Modern and contemporary history