From Head-Loading to the Iron Horse PDF Download

Author: Komla Tsey
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN: 9956728705
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
International development has its origins in the histories of nineteenth and early twentieth-century European colonisation. What happens when a leading colonial power decides to transform a model tropical colony, relying on head-loading of goods as the predominant form of transport, into a modern market economy on the back of the greatest British industrial ingenuity of the time railways? In this meticulously researched book, Komla Tsey brings to light the historical origins of a wide range of issues confronting present-day international development researchers and policy-makers, such as technology transfer, wealth creation versus equity of access, and ways to evaluate the benefits of development work, especially across cultures. In the context of the early twenty-first-century international investment interests in resource-rich Africa, Tsey argues, forensic historical research is required to determine the precise nature and scale of the financial and humanitarian injustices committed by British colonialists during the construction of major public works projects. More than providing opportunities to take possible legal actions for reparations, this research should also serve as a reminder to present-day African policy-makers and their international and local business partners that the injustices and blatant abuses of power of the past should never be repeated.

Author: Manu Karuka
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520969057
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Empire’s Tracks boldly reframes the history of the transcontinental railroad from the perspectives of the Cheyenne, Lakota, and Pawnee Native American tribes, and the Chinese migrants who toiled on its path. In this meticulously researched book, Manu Karuka situates the railroad within the violent global histories of colonialism and capitalism. Through an examination of legislative, military, and business records, Karuka deftly explains the imperial foundations of U.S. political economy. Tracing the shared paths of Indigenous and Asian American histories, this multisited interdisciplinary study connects military occupation to exclusionary border policies, a linked chain spanning the heart of U.S. imperialism. This highly original and beautifully wrought book unveils how the transcontinental railroad laid the tracks of the U.S. Empire.

Author: Franklin Obeng-Odoom
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
ISBN: 1783606622
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Neoclassical economics, the intellectual bedrock of modern capitalism, faces growing criticisms, as many of its key assumptions and policy prescriptions are systematically challenged. Yet, there remains one field of economics where these limitations continue virtually unchallenged: the study of cities and regions in built-environment economics. In this book, Franklin Obeng-Odoom draws on institutional, Georgist and Marxist economics to clearly but comprehensively show what the key issues are today in thinking about urban economics. In doing so, he demonstrates the widespread tensions and contradictions in the status quo, showing how to reconstruct urban economics in order to create a more just society and environment.

Author: Martin S. Shanguhyia
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000721752
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Development in Modern Africa: Past and Present Perspectives contributes to our understanding of Africa’s experiences with the development process. It does so by adopting a historical and contemporary analysis of this experience. The book is set within the context of critiques on development in Africa that have yielded two general categories of analysis: skepticism and pessimism. While not overlooking the shortcomings of development, the themes in the book express an optimistic view of Africa’s development experiences, highlighting elements that can be tapped into to enhance the condition of African populations and their states. By using case studies from precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial Africa, contributors to the volume demonstrate that human instincts to improve material, social and spiritual words are universal. They are not limited to the Western world, which the term and process of development are typically associated with. Before and after contact with the West, Africans have actively created institutions and values that they have actively employed to improve individual and community lives. This innovative spirit has motivated Africans to integrate or experiment with new values and structures, challenges, and solutions to human welfare that resulted from contact with colonialism and the postcolonial global community. The book will be of interest to academics in the fields of history, African studies, and regional studies.

Author: Vineeta Sinha
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1805390171
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
The notions of labour, mobility and piety have a complex and intertwined relationship. Using ethnographic methods and a historical perspective, Temple Tracks critically outlines the interlink of railway construction in colonial and post-colonial Asia, as well as the anthropology of infrastructure and transnational mobilities with religion. In Malaysia and Singapore, evidence of religion-making and railway-building from a colonial past is visible in multiple modes and media as memories, recollections and ‘traces’.

Author: Komla Tsey
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN: 9956726508
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
In this thought provoking book, Komla Tsey argues that if governments, NGOs, development donor agencies and researchers are serious about development in Africa, they need to get down to ground level, both metaphorically and literally. They must search deep into Africa's own rich oral traditions by creating space and opportunity for ordinary Africans, whose voices have so far been conspicuously absent in the development discourse, to tell and share their own stories of development. Story-sharing as research methodology acts as a mirror, reflecting the participants' self-evaluation of where they have come from, where they are now, and how to proceed into the future. They are strategies that can empower and enable individuals and communities of people to be agents of their own change which, in Tsey's view, is what development is all about.

Author: Franklin Obeng-Odoom
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135051941
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
The world development institutions commonly present 'urban governance' as an antidote to the so-called 'urbanisation of poverty' and 'parasitic urbanism' in Africa. Governance for Pro-Poor Urban Development is a comprehensive and systematic analysis of the meaning, nature, and effects of 'urban governance' in theory and in practice, with a focus on Ghana, a country widely regarded as an island of good governance in the sub region. The book illustrates how diverse groups experience urban governance differently and contextualizes how this experience has worsened social differentiation in cities. This book will be of great interest to students, teachers, and researchers in development studies, and highly relevant to anyone with an interest in urban studies, geography, political economy, sociology, and African studies.

Author: Jim Reynolds
Publisher: Purich Books
ISBN: 0774880961
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
Colonialism endures in Canada today. Dismantling it requires an understanding of how colonialism operated across the British Empire and why Canada’s colonial experience was unique. Whereas colonies such as India were ruled through despotism and violence, Canada’s white settler population governed itself while oppressing the Indigenous peoples whose lands they were on. Canada and Colonialism shows that Canadians’ support for colonial rule – both at home and abroad – is the reason colonialism remains entrenched in Canadian law and society today. Author Jim Reynolds presents a truly compelling account of Canada’s colonial coming of age and its impacts on Indigenous peoples, including the settler-led internal colonialism behind the Indian Act and those who enforced it. As one of the nation’s leading experts in Aboriginal law, Reynolds provides a vital accounting of the historical underpinnings and contemporary challenges the nation must address to reconcile with Indigenous peoples and move toward decolonization.

Author: Jennifer Hart
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253023254
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
As early as the 1910s, African drivers in colonial Ghana understood the possibilities that using imported motor transport could further the social and economic agendas of a diverse array of local agents, including chiefs, farmers, traders, fishermen, and urban workers. Jennifer Hart's powerful narrative of auto-mobility shows how drivers built on old trade routes to increase the speed and scale of motorized travel. Hart reveals that new forms of labor migration, economic enterprise, cultural production, and social practice were defined by autonomy and mobility and thus shaped the practices and values that formed the foundations of Ghanaian society today. Focusing on the everyday lives of individuals who participated in this century of social, cultural, and technological change, Hart comes to a more sensitive understanding of the ways in which these individuals made new technology meaningful to their local communities and associated it with their future aspirations.

Author: Jennifer Hart
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253069351
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
In Making an African City, Jennifer Hart traces the way that British colonial officials, Accra Town Council members, and a diverse group of technocrats used regulation to define what an "acceptable" city looked like. Unlike cities elsewhere on the continent, Accra had a long history of urbanism that predated British colonial presence. By criminalizing some activities and privileging others, colonial officials sought to marginalize indigenous practices of Accra residents and shape the development of a new, "modern" city. Hart argues, however, that residents regularly pushed back, protesting regulations, refusing to participate in newly developed systems, reappropriating infrastructure, demanding rights to city services, and asserting their own informal vision for the future of the city. While urban plans and regulations ultimately failed to substantively remake the city, their effects were and are still felt by urban residents, who are often subject to but not served by urban infrastructure. Making an African City explores how the informalization of Accra's development was a historical process, not a natural and self-evident phenomenon, which connects the history of the city with the history of urban development and the growth of technocracy around the world.