Suchergebnisse

SummaryThis article seeks to explore from a new angle the massacre associated with the slave shipZong– that is, the murder of around 130 slaves at sea in 1781. Hitherto, the massacre has been looked at largely in terms of the law, particularly insurance law, and the commercial logic of the British slave trade. This article gives due weight to the overriding concerns of commerce in theZongatrocity, but it also explains it in terms of the culture and context of the selection of captives for the slave trade, a process in which ships' surgeons were prominent. It argues that this process habituated surgeons and captains – the Master of theZongwas both – to the possibility of death (at the hands of African controllers) of the captives they deemed unfit for the Atlantic slave trade. The article proposes that in the slave trade, medical expertise became yoked to the fateful decision of whether or not to accord commodity value to the captive. Where the surgeons decided to deny commodity value to a captive in the trade, he or she suffered "commercial death", which was all too often followed by death itself.

"This article emphasises that the phenomena of a racial order are so various and complex that the concept of class is inevitably limited in explaining them. Nevertheless, the analysis seeks to demonstrate where class, and more generally capitalist development, were fundamental to the elaboration of racial discrimination in South Africa. It reveals how master-servant relations - a much neglected area in South African scholarship - were not only intrinsic to the racial order but key to uniting the classes within white society. The article goes on to explore how policies of racial discrimination, initially framed in the interests of particular classes, could ultimately become divorced from their original functions and put to use in a racial-political project that was not originally envisaged. In re-opening the debate over the relationship of race to class in South Africa, the article draws on the work of Tim Mason in another context, and offers a method for determining the balance of class and other factors in the development of racial domination in South Africa." (author's abstract)

This article explores the factors that restrained a bout of racial violence which erupted during a white miners' strike in South Africa in 1922. Far fewer lives were taken during the violence than might have been the case, given that the perpetrators of the killings were drawn from an armed and militarised community. As the analysis demonstrates, the pogrom was limited by actions undertaken by the police, by various whites linked to potential black victims, by black resisters themselves, and by personnel from the organisations of white labour. Finally, it is argued that the enmeshment of whites and blacks in master-servant relations created such familiarity and connections between the races that the potential for demonising black people was limited. This, it is suggested, was decisive for restricting the scale of the pogrom. ; Dieser Artikel untersucht die Umstände bzw. Maßnahmen, mit denen ein Fall rassistischer Gewalt, der 1922 während eines Streiks der weißen Bergarbeiter in Südafrika ausbrach, eingedämmt wurde. Bei den Gewalttaten kamen weitaus weniger Menschen ums Leben, als dies hätte der Fall sein können, da die Täter aus einer bewaffneten und militarisierten Gemeinschaft stammten. Wie die Analyse zeigt, wurde das Pogrom durch Aktionen der Polizei, durch verschiedene Weiße, die mit potentiellen schwarzen Opfern in Verbindung gebracht wurden, durch schwarze Widerstandskämpfer selbst und durch Personal aus den Organisationen der weißen Arbeiterschaft begrenzt. Schließlich wird argumentiert, dass die Verstrickung von Weißen und Schwarzen in ungleichen Beziehungen (Master-Servant) eine solche Vertrautheit und Verbindung zwischen den Rassen schuf, dass das Potenzial zur Dämonisierung der Schwarzen begrenzt war. Dies, so wird behauptet, war ausschlaggebend für die Beschränkung des Ausmaßes des Pogroms.

"In this book historians and social scientists examine boycotts from the eighteenth century to the present day. Employed in struggles against British rule in the American colonies, against racial discrimination in the United States during the Civil Rights movement, and Apartheid in South Africa, today it is Israel that is the focus of a campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). Boycotts have featured in campaigns undertaken by labour, consumer and nationalist movements. Jews were the target of boycotts advanced by various national movements in Central and Eastern Europe and the anti-Jewish boycotts instigated by the Nazis. In this collection, contributors explore the history of past boycott movements and examine the different narratives put forward by proponents and opponents of the current BDS movement directed against Israel: one which places the movement within a history of struggles for 'human rights'; the other which regards BDS as the latest manifestation of an antisemitic tradition." (Verlagsbeschreibung)