A case history based assessment of female genital mutilation in Sudan

The subject of female genital mutilation is discussed through a selection of excerpts from a narrative derived from interviews with educated Sudanese women. The original interview form ensures an inside, contextual presentation of the subject, providing the clues for approaches towards elimination of the practice. With evaluation and planning strategies in mind, the issues are placed in the conceptual framework of the segregation of the sexes and viewed through the ideas of gender-based discrimination as outlined in CEDAW.     

Slavery in capitalism

Conclusion I have attempted here to reconceptualize the dynamic of the cotton culture by situating it within its world-historical context. This does not, however, mean a simple extension of view. Rather, it is a methodological matter in the sense that slavery itself needs to be reconceptualized as a component of the global circuits of the wage-labor regime. Nineteenth-century capitalism, under British hegemony, transcended segmented colonial system markets and forged a global unity of commodity circuits reproducing industrial capital. Under this regime, commodity producers worldwide were now subject to the law of value. This is the context within which nineteenth-century slavery needs to be analyzed.The resurgence of slavery during this period appears paradoxical - defying the logic of the industrial regime shaping the world market. Not so if we reconceptualize slavery as now internal to that regime, and one of the several forms of labor that expanded with the general development of the regime. But why then did slavery subsequently collapse? Again, being internal to the regime, it was now subject to that regime's superior economic competition, in addition to being a social and moral anachronism in the ideology of that regime. In either case, the relation between slavery and capitalism was not governed by some essential linear economic movement in which slavery was a historical anachronism.The key methodological point is to distinguish the phenomenal form of slavery from its historical content. The same applies to our conception of wage labor. While empirically it may have concentrated in metropolitan regions, theoretically it had universal implications insofar as it was premised on the development of global commodity circuits. Not only was metropolitan wage labor globally sourced, but also non-metropolitan commodity producers were redefined (but not necessarily extinguished) as they absorbed capitalist circuits and submitted to value relations. But we cannot understand the dynamics if it is assumed that non-wage forms of labor are prior to wage labor. As Marx wrote: It would ... be unfeasible and wrong to let the economic categories follow one another in the same sequence as that in which they were historically decisive. Their sequence is determined, rather, by their relation to one another in modern bourgeois society, which is precisely the opposite of that which seems to be their natural order or which corresponds to historical development. The precondition of this historical method is what unifies the body of literature earlier identified as locating the formation of modern regional identities and local labor systems within determinant world-historical processes. The goal is to understand their distinctiveness as outcomes of a connective historical process, rather than as unique and bounded cultures in their own right.In this essay the connective historical process is the rise of wage labor, and the generalization of its conditions of reproduction. The process has various dimensions, unifying either extant or newly created commodity producers. An illustration of the former process is the restructuring of relations between the Ottoman state and its peasants in the context of late-nineteenth-century European imperialism. New taxes on peasants were geared to expanding grain exports to finance the national debt resulting from public loans from Europe to build railways. Peasant commodity production became linked to the provision of wage foods for the European proletariat - as Luxemburg put it: and so the peasant grain of Asia, converted into money, also serves to turn into cash the surplus value that has been extorted from the German workers. Illustrating the latter process, of newly created commodity producers, is Friedmann's work on New World family farming. But more often than not it is a combination, where extant producers are redefined and reproduced on an expanding scale. This is the case with Roseberry's Venezuelan peasants - both precipitates of global processes of proletarianization, and exemplars of an unresolved historical movement of smallholder survival strategies (cash-crop coffee growing in this instance). In conclusion, the rise of wage labor and the generalization of its conditions of reproduction are more than a process of uneven and combined development on a global scale. It is also a process of reformulation of the content of non-wage forms of labor within a contradictory unity governed by value relations. It is here that the concept of a global wage relation becomes useful. As an abstract concept, it expresses (a) those value relations common to the different phenomenal forms of commodity-producing labor, and (b) the historical fact of wage-labor's determinant position within this unity. The global wage relation is not coterminous with the phenomenon of wage labor alone, rather it expresses the world-historical conditions that constitute wage labor and its contradictory movement. Nineteenth-century slavery was one such condition. Its resurgence and demise precisely expressed the fluidity of the global wage relation, as a world-historical relation.

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Domestic Slavery in Renaissance Italy1

It is unlikely that additional quantifiable data found in Italian archives will alter significantly the conclusions reached by twentieth-century economic historians about slavery in Italy during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Historians of slavery must now ask new questions of old sources and new ones that continue to surface. As this study shows, the ways merchants in Italy differentiated along ethnic and religious lines among the slaves they dealt in sheds light more on how the people of Italy made distinctions among themselves than on the origins and religion of their captives.     

Review essay: Slavery in Africa

The Ideology of Slavery in Africa. Edited by Paul E. Lovejoy. Beverly Hills and London: Sage Publications, 1981. 311pp.

Transformations in slavery: a history of slavery in Africa. By Paul E. Lovejoy. Cambridge University Press, 1983. xvi + 347pp. Bibl., Index.     

Slavery and freedom in South Africa

The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840. By RICHARD ELPHICK and HERMANN GILIOMEE. Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman, 1989. Second Edition. xix, 623 pp.

The Slave Question: Liberty and Property in South Africa. By R.L. WATSON. Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1990. xi, 274 pp.     

A Theory of Capitalist Slavery

The relationship between slavery and capitalism has become a renewed topic of debate, yet scholars have not been able to agree on a definition of capitalism. In this article I first clear up some misconceptions and situate the debate in the Marxian tradition from which it arose. I argue that while non‐Marxian accounts of capitalism fail to explain the key social transformations that have accompanied the rise of capitalism globally, Marxian accounts have failed to comprehend similar transformations that occurred on American slave plantations in the 19th century. I then present a general model of capitalism, building on earlier work by Brenner and Wood, that both incorporates and explains the distinctive dynamics of capitalist slavery in the antebellum South.     

Slavery in the Americas: Resistance,liberation, emancipation

Author: BERGAD, LAIRD W.; Slavery and the Demographic and Economic History of Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1720-1888; Author: HIGGINS, KATHLEEN J.; 'Licentious Liberty' in a Brazilian Gold-Mining Region. Slavery, Gender and Social Control in Eighteenth-Century Sabara, Minas Gerais