Dr. Brigitta Bernet

Dr. Michel Doortmont, FRGS

University of Groningen, Netherlands

Slave Trade as Family Business: Euro-African Trading Networks in the Era of the Dutch Atlantic Slave Trade, 1730-1820

E-Mail: m.r.doortmont(at)rug.nl

Michel Doortmont teaches in international relations and African studies at the universities of Groningen and Leiden (African Studies Centre). Since 2012 he is academic coordinator of the Erasmus Mundus programme EU-SATURN building capacity for research in an international context in South African universities, through exchange of PhD and Master students and staff in numerous disciplines. He is co-editor of History in Africa: A Journal of Method and the book series African Sources for African History and Sources for African History. His research focusses on several themes, including Dutch relations with West Africa (especially Ghana) from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, multicultural elite formation in colonial contexts, African historiography and historical methodology, and the phenomenon of mutual cultural heritage and cultural identification of the other in the history of the West and its former colonies.

At re:work he is working at the completion of a book, Slave Trade as Family Business: Euro-African Trading Networks in the Era of the Dutch Atlantic Slave Trade, 1730-1820, in which the organisation of Dutch slave trading activities are studied through a number of family histories of Gold Coast (Ghanaian) families of mixed Euro-African descent. Dutch archival records, combined with oral traditions and other materials, make it possible to reconstruct the family history of some of the leading commercial families of the eighteenth century, in a period when the Dutch West India Company monopoly on the slave trade lapsed, and private merchants – both African and European – entered into the trade directly. This study follows these families through careers, business exploits, and private adventures and misadventures, across three continents and over three to five generations. The overall picture that comes out of this micro-cosmological and genealogical approach provides for an alternative analytical framework for our understanding of the organisation of the slave trade in coastal West Africa in particular, and the social organisation of cross-cultural commerce in general.

Publications

(2012) “Kamerling in Ghana: A Euro-African family history and an old-fashioned love story”, De Nederlandsche Leeuw: Tijdschrift van het Koninklijk Nederlandsch Genootschap voor Geslacht- en Wapenkunde 129, 178-192.

(2011) “Making History in Africa: David Henige and the Quest for Method in African History”, History in Africa: A Journal of Method 38, 7-20.

(2007) The Transatlantic Slave Trade: Landmarks, Legacies, Expectations, Accra [co-editor with J.K. Anquandah & N.J. Apoku-Agyemang].

(2007) “The Dutch Atlantic slave trade as family business: The case of the Van der Noot de Gietere – Van Bakergem family”, in: Trans-Atlantic slave trade: Landmarks, legacies, expectations, 106-151.

(2007) Sources for the mutual history of Ghana and the Netherlands. An annotated guide to the Dutch archives relating to Ghana and West Africa in the Nationaal Archief, 1593-1960s, Leiden / Boston [with. J. Smit].

(2006) The castles of Ghana. Axim, Butre, Anomabu. Historical and architectural research on three Ghana forts, Rome [co-editor with B. Savoldi].

(2005) The Pen-Pictures of Modern Africans and African Celebrities by Charles Francis Hutchison, Leiden / Boston.

Professor Gail Kligman

University of California, Los Angeles, USA

A Multi-Sited Ethnography of East-West European Migratory Strategies and their Impact on Gender, Generation, and Family

Telefon: +49 (0) 30 20 93 70211

Telefax:  +49 (0) 30 20 93 70225

E-Mail: gkligman(at)international.ucla.edu

A multi-sited ethnography of east-west European migratory strategies and their impact on gender, generation, and family

Gail Kligman is a professor of sociology at UCLA and director of the UCLA Center for European and Eurasian Studies. Her research explores the interrelationships between politics, policy, culture, and gender in socialist and postsocialist Romania, and in postsocialist Central East Europe. The intellectual interests that have informed her work are comparative, historical, and interdisciplinary; methodologically, she has done qualitative, ethnographic, and archival research. Her most recent book, Peasants Under Siege: The Collectivization of Romanian Agriculture, 1949-1962 (Princeton University Press 2011) was co-authored with Katherine Verdery (CUNY, Anthropology).

Peasants Under Siege is an historical ethnography of Party-state formation in Romania analyzed through the collectivization of agriculture. In a largely agrarian country such as Romania, collectivization was the first mass action through which the new communist regime initiated its radical program of social, political, cultural, and economic transformation.  This complex process assaulted the very foundations of rural life and fundamentally altered social organization and social relations, including gender and generational roles in the household and in the socialist economy. Collectivization was not simply an adjunct to industrial development, but part of a broader set of modernizing technologies. The authors argue that collectivization was crucial in creating the Party-state that emerged, its mechanisms of rule, and the “new persons” who were its subjects. The analysis is based on extensive oral historical and archival data from a nineteen-person, multi-disciplinary research project that they co-directed.

The book has received a number of awards, among them: the 2012 Barbara Jelavich Prize for Distinguished Monograph and the 2012 Davis Center (Harvard University) Book Prize in Political and Social Studies (both from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies; and honorable mentions for the 2012 Barrington Moore Best Book Award in Comparative-Historical Sociology and the 2012 Political Sociology Section Best Book Award (both from the American Sociology Association).

At re:work, Gail Kligman will immerse herself in selected readings in migration studies, including empirical ones of postsocialist migration (circular and permanent) from eastern to western Europe, with the aim of preliminarily formulating a project on gendered and generational aspects of migration and the impacts on home and host countries. The scope of this project remains to be determined.

Literatur

The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania (UC Press, 1998)

The Politics of Gender after Socialism: A Comparative Historical Essay, co-authored with Susan Gal (PUP, 2000)

Peasants Under Siege: The Collectivization of Romanian Agriculture, 1949-1962, co-authored with Katherine Verdery, (PUP, 2011), 

Professor Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann

University of California, Berkeley, USA

History of Human Rights.

slhoffmann(at)berkeley.edu

history.berkeley.edu/people/stefan-ludwig-hoffmann

is associate professor for late modern Europe at the Department of History of the University of California, Berkeley and director of the human rights interdisciplinary minor at Berkeley. Together with Samuel Moyn, he edits the series Human Rights in History, which is published by Cambridge University Press. He obtained his MA at the Johns Hopkins University and completed his doctorate at the University of Bielefeld. His research interests are German history, transnational history and the history of human rights since the Enlightenment.

At the research centre, Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann is working on a new history of human rights, which will be published in 2013 by C.H.Beck Verlag.

Literature

Editor, Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

“Germany is No More: Defeat, Occupation, and the Postwar Order” In Oxford Handbook of Modern German History, (ed) Helmut Walser Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 597-618.

“Gazing at Ruins: German Defeat as Visual Experience” Journal of Modern European History 9 (2011), 328-350. 

Co-editor,“Demokratie im Schatten der Gewalt: Geschichten des Privaten im deutschen Nachkrieg“ (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010).

Editor, “Moralpolitik. Geschichte der Menschenrechte im 20. Jahrhundert” (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010).

“Koselleck, Arendt, and the Anthropology of Historical Experiences” History and Theory 49 (May 2010), 212-236.

Politics of Sociability: Freemasonry and German Civil Society, 1840–1918. Transl. by Tom Lampert. Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007).

Civil Society, 1750–1914, Studies in European History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

Professor Baz Lecocq

Universität Gent, Belgium

The "Awad el Djouh Affair". Slave Trade to Saudi Arabia, Human Rights, and the ILO (1948-1962).

baz.lecocq(at)ugent.be

is an Africanist historian, holding a PhD in the social sciences from Amsterdam University (2002). Between 2003 and 2007 he worked as a research fellow at the Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin on the contemporary history of (labor) migration and the urbanization of the Tuareg people in the Central Sahara (Libya, Mali, Niger). Since 2007 he has been lecturing in African history at Ghent University. His complete curriculum vitae can be found at the website of the CCC (Communities, Comparisons, Connections) Research Group at Ghent University.

Baz Lecocq will be working on the slave trade from French West Africa to the Arabian Peninsula in the mid-twentieth century. In the 1950s, the continued existence of this slave trade drew wide international media attention. This, in turn, influenced debates on slavery, the slave trade and human rights within the Communauté Française, the International Labor Organization, and the Working Commission drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. His project uses the mediatized micro-histories of the slave trade as a lens to analyze the discursive construction of the postcolonial world in the North Atlantic, Africa and the Middle East. This discursive history will be framed by the Cold War "questions" that gave it shape: labor issues, decolonization in Africa, and the changing geopolitics between the North Atlantic and the Middle East. Methodologically, the project will address the ways in which microstoria, the study of discursive praxis, and “classical” political history can be combined to intertwine historical actors across polities, policies, legal systems and continents into a single global and translocal history.

Professor Hagen Schulz-Forberg

University of Aarhus, Denmark

Conceptual History and Global Translations: The Euro-Asian Semantics of the Social and the Economic.

hishsf(at)hum.au.dk

is an historian and received his doctorate from the European University Institute in Florence. As of 2007 he has been teaching international history at the University of Aarhus. His complete curriculum vitae can be found at the website of the University of Aarhus.

Hagen Schulz-Forberg is participating in a larger project on the global history of work: Conceptual History and Global Translations: The Euro-Asian Semantics of the Social and the Economic. The goal of this research field (jointly developed with Bo Strath, the Renvall Institute and the University of Helsinki) is to investigate the conception and imagining of the “social” and the “economic” in various European and Asiatic languages. Both concepts can be semantically located in the Western world, so their use in a global world without a Western center is extremely problematic. The project’s objective is to create a transnational epistemological basis that equitably comprises both Asian and European ideas and conceptions relating to both notions. At the center of the project is the question as to what degree the dominance of Western-shaped ideas and concepts can be overcome in favor of a kind of global communication that crosses cultural and civilizational divides. The concern here is not to play Asian and European perspectives off against one another but rather to conjoin both perspectives in historical processes.

Publications

(2010), with Bo Strath, The Political History of European Integration: The Hypocrisy of Democracy-through-market, Basingstoke: Routledge.

(forthcoming 2011) (ed.), Zero Hours. Conceptual Insecurities and Ideas of New Beginnings in the Interwar Period from a Global Perspective, Brussels et al.: P.I.E. - Peter Lang.

(forthcoming 2012), with Morakot Jewachinda-Meyer (eds.), Appropriating the Social and the Economic: Asian Translations, Conceptualizations and Mobilizations of European Key Concepts from the 1860s to the 1940s.

(2011), 'Before Integration: Human Rights and Post-War Europe', in Menno Spiering and Michael Wintle (eds.), European Identity and the Second World War, London: Palgrave, 37-54.

(forthcoming 2011), 'Which Way to the Good Society? The Liberal Crisis and the Birth of Neoliberalism after the First World War', in Hagen Schulz-Forberg (ed.), Zero Hours. Conceptual Insecurities and Ideas of New Beginnings in the Interwar Period from a Global Perspective, Brussels et al.: P.I.E. - Peter Lang.

(forthcoming 2012), 'Global Conceptual History - Theory and Practice of a New Research Field', in Hagen Schulz-Forberg and Morakot Jewachinda-Meyer (eds.), Appropriating the Social and the Economic: Asian Translations, Conceptualizations and Mobilizations of European Key Concepts from the 1860s to the 1940s.

(forthcoming 2012), 'Sovereignty', in Global Studies Encyclopedia, London: Sage.

(forthcoming 2012), 'Welfare State', in Global Studies Encyclopedia, London: Sage.

(forthcoming 2012), 'World Federalist Movement', in Global Studies Encyclopedia, London: Sage.