Research Catalog

Title

Pawnship in Africa : debt bondage in historical perspective / edited by Toyin Falola and Paul E. Lovejoy.

Publication

Boulder : Westview Press, 1994.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Additional Authors

• Falola, Toyin
• Lovejoy, Paul E.

Description

viii, 341 p.; 23 cm.

Summary

"Pawnship, a legal category of social and economic dependency, has been largely neglected in the historiography of Africa. Yet the labor of pawns - freeborn women, men and children indentured in payment of interest on a debt - was an important supplement to that of slaves in the precolonial and colonial eras and a substitute for slave labor in the twentieth century. This book examines the origins of pawnship; the economic factors that contributed to its spread; the ideological and institutional framework that supported pawnship; its organization; the experience of pawns; the role of class, gender, and age; changes under colonial rule; and the decline and extinction of pawnship."--BOOK JACKET.

Series Statement

African modernization and development series

Uniform Title

African modernization and development series.

Alternative Title

Debt bondage in historical perspective

Subject

Peonage > Africa > History

Genre/Form

History

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

• Pawnship in historical perspective / Toyin Falola and Paul E. Lovejoy -- Pawning and slavery on the Kenya coast / Fred Morton -- Pawning, politics and matriliny in northeastern Tanzania / James L. Giblin -- On pawning and enslavement for debt in the pre-colonial slave coast / Robin Law -- Pawnship in Nembe, Niger Delta / Ebiegberi J. Alogoa and Atei M. Okorobia -- Pawnship in Igbo society / Felix K. Ekechi -- Pawnship in Edo society / Uyilawa Usuanlele -- Human pawning in Asante, 1800-1950 / Gareth Austin -- Pawns, porters, and petty traders: women in the transition to cash crop agriculture in Colonial Ghana / Beverly Grier -- Pawns and politics: the pawnship debate in western Nigeria / Judith Byfield -- Pawning in the Emirate of Ilorin / Ann O'Hear -- Pawnship in Colonial southwestern Nigeria / Toyin Falola -- Pawning in coastal northwest Sierra Leone, 1870-1910 / Allen M. Howard.
• Indirect rule and the brief apogee of pawnship in Nimba, Liberia, 1918-1930 / Martin Ford -- The resurgence of pawning in French West Africa during the depression of the 1930s / Martin A. Klein and Richard Roberts.

ISBN

0813384575 (alk. paper) :

LCCN

^^^94005911^

OCLC

29911548

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library