Introduction: Globalisation and identity

Abstract

This paper examines the identities of early leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) at a time when British influences still prevailed in South Africa. African attitudes to the “British World” reveal complex identities that also reflected political and cultural variations according to race, class and region. Relations between ANC leaders and the African “elite” and between the elite and subaltern strata were not straightforward. A careful reading of the discourses in and around Congress points to contradictory attitudes to things British and to ambiguous identities that lingered and contributed to the mix of social and national ideas and identities that influence contemporary South Africa.     

Protecting Freeborn Muslims: The Sokoto Caliphate's Attempts to Prevent Illegal Enslavement and its Acceptance of the Strategy of Ransoming

This article builds upon previous work on the discourse of legal and illegal slavery in Islamic West Africa and on the issue of illegal enslavement as a major cause of the Sokoto jihad. It argues that the protection of freeborn Muslims was a major policy concern for the Sokoto government but that, due to internal factors, the government could not stop the enslavement of freeborn Muslims nor enforce the legally preferred remedy of free release. The government's acceptance of the ransoming of illegally captive individuals by family and friends is interpreted as a demonstration of the weakness of the Sokoto Caliphate government.     

Rethinking runaways in the British Atlantic World: Britain,the Caribbean,West Africa and North America

This essay utilises four exceptional case studies to explore the various causes, experiences and results of escape from slavery in the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century British Atlantic World. These are: Johnny Beckles in Barbados, Jamie Montgomery in Scotland, Castle Slaves at Cape Coast Castle on the West African Gold Coast; and Harriet and Beverly Hemings in Virginia. This essay illuminates the diverse forms of enslavement and escape, showing that while some sought escape from slavery and even their race, others sought sanctuary within slave society and even on plantations, while others used escape as a means of pressuring for changes in their lives and work as enslaved people.     

Freedom,Identity, and the Social History of Empire in Atlantic Cuba, 1795–1817

This essay examines a maritime case involving a Charleston-based French privateer in 1795 as well as members, subjects, and citizens of multiple societies from Western Africa, Cuba, Spain, and Great Britain in order to reveal the fluid legal foundations of trans-Atlantic regimes with respect to slavery and freedom. The French maritime seizure of a British slaving vessel in the Caribbean and the subsequent transfer of enslaved African peoples from British to French to Spanish authority in Cuba set the stage for nearly 40 years of litigation in both hemispheres. The case led to legal disputes in Philadelphia, Madrid, and Havana as members of this Atlantic society sought to confront the most prominent political and social issues of this era. While officials in Philadelphia sought to avoid entanglement in the imperial wars between France and Great Britain, officials in Madrid and Havana competed with each other in order to define the legal identities of a group of Carabalí-Oru peoples onboard the British vessel. For their part, this group of Carabalí-Oru peoples exploited the ambiguities created by a system of Atlantic jurisprudence while relying on their memory of the Middle Passage in order to challenge their unjust enslavement in Cuba.     

Changes in an intellectual elite 1960–1990: The Royal Society revisited

This paper has attempted a partial replication of Porter's study of an anglophone intellectual elite, i.e. Section II of the Royal Society. It has found continuing, albeit reduced, institutional domination by the University of Toronto, along with a notable decline in the role of Oxford. It has also found that foreign influence has increased with possible negative implications for the mobility opportunities of Canadians born in Canada¹⁰ and for the elite's performance of its social role of articulating and advancing the interests of Canadian society. While the domination of those of British ancestry has declined, the elite remains unrepresentative in terms of many of its ascribed social characteristics. In particular, a seemingly low representation of females, Jewish people, and Canadians born in Canada is evident. While Canadian intellectuals are now much more critical of the status quo than they were when Porter wrote, the separation between anglophone and francophone intellectuals appears to be as great as ever. All this may help to explain a number of the weaknesses which characterize Canadian society.     

Unity is strength: staff college and the British officer corps

Utilizing Bourdieu's concept of the habitus, Keith Macdonald has recently examined the elite social origins of the British officer corps. His analysis is valid as far at it goes but it ignores the professional practices of British officers. This article examines Britain's Joint Services Command and Staff College to assess the unification of the three services around common forms of military practice. It argues that while the new staff college has been effective in disseminating new forms of professional expertise among British officers, various practices have been institutionalized which actively undermine the unity of the officer corps.     

The Unpublished Papers of Frederick Jackson Turner

Students in the United States learn about the history of enslavement throughout their educational experiences. Yet our understanding of what students from different racial, ethnic, and gender backgrounds know about this difficult period in American history is limited. In this study, we use mixed methods to examine written narratives of students’ understanding of the history of enslavement in the United States. As a whole, narratives about enslavement were most commonly associated with its end (the Civil War and abolition) and with its violence (general brutality). Differences were found by race and ethnicity as well as by gender. Understanding how students narrate what they know can help educational researchers and teachers better serve diverse educational needs by designing curricula that relate to students’ multiple social identities.     

An Eccentric Analysis of Political Logistics of Maritime Mastery: Establishing a Framework

Definitions of sea power in reputable studies can be classified into two broad categories: sea power as a form of military power at sea, and sea power as the capacity at or from the sea to influence others’ actions or conditions. Despite the differences in definitions of sea power, the relevant literature written by international relations scholars, maritime historians, and naval affairs experts is abundant and has primarily focused on grand strategies, military strategies, and military doctrines. This paper briefly introduces an exceptional monograph on the logistic foundation of British maritime ascendancy, but it has not sufficiently explored the political processes of sea power. This paper thus utilises the concepts of politics, elite coalition, and power source to highlight the importance of studying the political processes behind the creation, maintenance, enhancement, and even corrosion and destruction of sea power. Specifically, building on the logistics of maritime ascendancy, this paper suggests that it is not only essential to examine how the state co-ordinates all required resources for its sea power, but that it is also necessary to evaluate how elite coalitions amenable to sea power are organised and sustained.     

Elite mobility and continuity during a regime change

How does a regime change influence elite mobility? By collecting data on elites after the Meiji Restoration in Japan in 1868, through which Japan transitioned from a feudal regime to a modern regime, we provide new evidence that the impact of the regime change on elite mobility varies across the stages of the regime change. We analyze the impact of the regime change from two aspects: (1) the composition of elites or elite membership and (2) the internal hierarchy within them. The regime change opened an opportunity for commoners to join the elite group. After the Meiji Restoration, the share of elites whose fathers were commoners in the former regime increased, as did the influence of meritocracy on elite ranks. However, once the new regime was established, the elite hierarchy started to reflect the social stratum of the former regime and the influence of meritocracy declined.     

Cape Verde at the End of Atlantic Slavery

This article situates the Cape Verde islands in the last half-century of Atlantic slavery. It concentrates on the final decades of bondage in Cape Verde, abolished selectively in 1857 and in totality in 1878, set within a longer period that began with international conventions prohibiting slave trafficking north of the equator and ended with the imperfect end of Atlantic slavery in the 1880s. Several dynamic forces, I argue, gave the Cape Verde archipelago an outsized role in Atlantic slavery's uneven decline and destruction. Some of these forces – the enforcement of anti-trafficking conventions, British abolitionist activity, the eclipsing of enslaved by free-labour in transatlantic labour flows – should be categorised as local echoes of a larger Atlantic narrative. Yet, in Cape Verde, we also find a dynamic admixture of phenomena – ecological crisis, epidemic disease, the advent of South Atlantic steamship service, experimentations in free soil, and imperial renewal – that projected the archipelago into and onto a wider nineteenth-century world made by enslavement and its destruction.     

Continuity and Change Within the Core Corporate Elite

This study examines the core corporate elite in both 1935 and 1970 in order to assess three alternative theoretical explanations of the composition of this elite. The elite members are identified as those 83 individuals in 1935 and those 70 individuals in 1970 who served as directors of four or more of the 200 largest nonfinancial and the 50 largest financial corporations. The three explanations of the social characteristics and institutional affiliations of the members of the core corporate elite are derived from the alternative theories of corporate control: family control theory, financial control theory, and management control theory. From the results of this analysis, it is apparent that individuals affiliated with financial institutions represent a disproportionately large and relatively constant share of the core corporate elite. Individuals who possess super-wealth or who are members of the upper class represent a significant but somewhat declining share of this elite. Finally, most of the members of the core corporate elite are managers rather than entrepreneurs or inheritors. Moreover, the proportion of elite members who are managers has increased whereas the proportion of elite members who are entrepreneurs has decreased over time. In general, the core corporate elite is remarkably stable, in terms of its composition, even over a period of several decades.     

The Jack Wills crowd: towards a sociology of an elite subculture

British sociologists have long been interested in youth sub‐cultures. However British sociologists have tended to focus on working class subcultures and avoided engagement with exclusive sub‐cultures of elite social groups. This article seeks to attend to this gap by examining the subculture of a British elite: ex‐public school students at select universities in the UK in the twenty‐first century. This group consists of a relatively small group of young adults, aged between 18 and 23, who attended public schools, especially one of the nine Clarendon schools (Eton, Winchester, Westminster, St. Paul's, Merchant Taylor's, Shrewsbury, Rugby, Harrow and Charterhouse), and were students at a selective group of British universities, primarily Oxford and Cambridge, Durham, Bristol, Exeter, Bath, Manchester, St Andrews and Edinburgh. The article examines the way in which this group has reconfigured and re‐constituted itself in the face of globalizing challenges. Specifically, it examines the way in which participation of ex‐public school students in events run by and under the patronage of the high street retailing company, Jack Wills, has played a galvanising role for this group in the last decade. The Jack Wills crowd is an example of how some young adults form exclusive social networks and reproduce prevailing forms of privilege. The social networks built around the Jack Wills subculture is likely to provide them with advantages in the job market through a prodigious network of connections and patrons. The Jack Wills subculture potentially contributions to the socio‐economic reproduction of the higher professional middle classes.     

Contemporary British Feminism: A social movement in abeyance?

This paper addresses the issue of social movement abeyance in relation to contemporary British feminism. It argues that currently British feminism is a social movement in abeyance that is not actively confronting the social system, and is largely preoccupied with maintaining itself through service providing voluntary organizations, educational and intellectual activities and incorporation into elite politics. The analysis of abeyance is also developed at the conceptual level by adding further detail to how we might theorize abeyance by contrasting it with the insurgent phase of social movement activity.     

Uncovering testimonies of slavery and the slave trade in missionary sources: the SHADD biographies project and the CMS and MMS archives for Sierra Leone,Nigeria, and the Gambia

This article highlights narratives of enslavement held in the Church Missionary Society and Methodist Missionary Society archives for the Sierra Leone, Yoruba, and Gambia missions in the nineteenth century. Its particular focus is on testimonies of Africans who experienced enslavement in Africa and were subsequently sold to Europeans on the coast and embarked on trans-Atlantic slave vessels. These documents form part of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)-funded SHADD: Studies in the History of the African Diaspora – Documents project, a digital publication of the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on Africa and its Diasporas at York University (http://tubman.info.yorku.ca/publications/shadd/). This article catalogues both the narratives uncovered to date – among the longest unpublished accounts of enslavement in Africa – and research strategies for uncovering more. It concludes with an appendix indexing digitized and transcribed documents available on the SHADD database as research and teaching resources.     

家庭背景、体制转型与中国农村精英的代际传承(1978-1996)

使用一个1996年收集的全国抽样数据,并结合事件史分析方法(离散时间风险模型),本文探讨了1978年中国农村经济体制改革后,到底是哪些农民能够抓住机会实现经济上的成功并成为农村中的精英阶层。本研究具体检验了中国农村居民的精英职业地位获得是如何受到他们改革前或解放前的家庭背景影响的。数据分析结果表明:第一,旧式精英(解放前的政治或经济精英)和新式精英(解放后再分配经济时期的政治或经济精英)家庭背景的农民,改革后进入非农职业的机率都比较高。第二,在不同历史阶段,精英职业获得模式是不同的。低风险性是导致改革早期新、旧精英的后代的选择趋同的主要原因,反映了他们在对社会经济发展走向无法清晰把握时的一种选择理性,而改革后期他们非农化道路的分野则充分体现了个体的社会行动是如何受其家庭背景(或精英文化因素)影响的。基于这些发现,作者提出精英文化的代际传承观点,指出除了当前学界讨论较多的权力和人力资本因素之外,文化因素也是转型期中国农村社会分层的重要作用机制。     

The denial of slavery in contemporary American sociology

Theory and Society - American sociology has largely neglected enslavement as a topic of study, despite slavery’s being one of the most foundational, pervasive, and far-reaching social...     

Guest Editor's Introduction

Classical social theory in the Western tradition concerned itself with the history of the human condition and sought answers to big questions such as the meaning of change and progress. They were interested in the nature, origins and consequences for human life of modern society, with its new means of organizing production as well as legal and political arrangements. Contrary to the optimism of the Enlightenment with its unbounded faith in the ability of reason and scientific inquiry to liberate humans from domination by both religion and nature, classical social theorists saw the negative side of modern civilization. This can be summarized in terms of the loss of freedom or the enslavement of humans, which each theorist understood as taking different forms. For Marx it was alienation, for Weber confinement in the iron-cage of rationality, and for Durkheim anomie. Although Ibn Khaldun lived centuries before the rise of classical social theory and was by no means a product of the modern world, it is possible to read his work as thematising the absence of freedom or enslavement as well. Bringing out this aspect of Ibn Khaldun shows, to some extent, the modern relevance of his thought. This article elaborates on Ibn Khaldun's theme of enslavement via his discussion on luxury and senility. It is the enslavement of sedentary people to luxury that explains the loss of group feeling or ‘asabiyyah, setting in motion a chain of developments that results in the senility of the dynasty and its eventual demise. In the first section I discuss the Enlightenment promise of freedom. The section that follows discusses classical social theory's critique of modernity or what amounts to a loss of faith in the Enlightenment project. Here the thought of Marx, Weber and Durkheim are presented as examples of Western assessments of the problem of the human condition in modernity. I then turn in the next two sections to Ibn Khaldun, discussing his theory of the rise and decline of states in terms of the role played by luxury.     

Mary Prince,Grand Turk,and Antigua

The History of Mary Prince, A West-Indian Slave, Related by Herself, published in 1831 under the auspices of London's Anti-Slavery Society, is of great historical importance because of the rich details it gives about various aspects of enslavement. Its author, Mary Prince, was born in 1788 in Bermuda. She had five owners and was enslaved in three British Overseas Territories – Bermuda, Grand Turk Island and Antigua – before self-manumission in London in 1828. Prince is the earliest known freed black West Indian woman to author such a testimony. Susanna Strickland (later Moodie), a young abolitionist and skilled writer working with the Anti-Slavery Society, compiled the narrative which was a bestseller going to print three times in its first year of publication. It was also a valuable part of the abolitionists' strategy to attract public support for the abolitionist movement of the day. Investigation and authentication of the History's historical dimensions, such as physical remnants of sites where Prince was enslaved and listings in the Slave Registers of Former British Overseas Territories, may put to rest suspicion that it was exaggerated or partially fabricated by abolitionists. Much of this work has been completed in Bermuda but little has been done with regard to Grand Turk Island and Antigua, although Prince spent more than half her life enslaved in those two islands. This article outlines preliminary findings in both territories.     

The Norm among the Exceptional? Experiences of Latino Students in Elite Institutions

This article examines Latino students’ experiences within two elite educational contexts: an elite liberal arts college and an elite law school. Drawing on combined data of 42 in‐depth interviews, we interrogate how elite institutional spaces reify and shape panethnic identities. In the face of marginalization in predominantly white, elite spaces Latino students strategically search for new community and comfort, which in turn influence how they perceive their identities, encouraging a broadening of boundaries to include both panethnic and minority alliances. By documenting the experiences of Latino students in two stages of the educational pipeline, we show how elite institutions influence identity talk lead students to cultivate a sense of shared fate with other Latino‐origin individuals and at times, people of color in general.     

The public sphere and debates about europe in Britain

This article undertakes an analysis of British public debates on European integration by recourse to an original data set on political claims-making. The public sphere is conceptualized as a space where citizens interact through their acts of public communication. Such public communications are an important source of the Europe-building process, because they potentially provide public inputs to the elite-led processes of European political institutional integration. Our empirical findings show that British public debates are internalized within the nation-state rather than creating links to supra- or transnational European polities. In addition, we find relatively low levels of civil society engagement compared to that of political elites, and a high level of political competition between the two major political parties, Labour and Conservative. Overall, we argue that elite ambivalence to Britain's position within the European Union has created this climate of uncertainty and political competition over Europe.