Women’s Legal Agency and Property in the Court Records of Late Nineteenth-Century Brava

Kapteijns, Lidwien; Vianello, Alessandra

doi:10.1017/hia.2017.2

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 25 publications

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“…Records from coastal Somalia in the 1890s illustrate the frequency with which women engaged in commercial transactions, loaning money to male family members and partners, but also borrowing money and putting up propertyreal estate, jewellery, livestock, and moreas collateral. 48 Research from the Zanzibar archipelago, too, demonstrates the preponderance of women in the credit economy, both as lenders (often, but not always, to their male relatives) and as borrowers. 49 The wives of Gujarati merchants actively mobilized their property in support of their husbands' business endeavours, but they also took to a range of contracts in order to raise credit.…”

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Into the bazaar: Indian Ocean vernaculars in the age of global capitalism

Bishara¹,

Wint²

2020

Journal of Global History

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Drawing on a far-flung, multilingual archive of contracts and financial instruments from around the western Indian Ocean, this article highlights how cross-cultural trade depended on the ability of groups to translate between one system and another, rendering one commercial lexicon legible to another so as to produce commensurability and allow for conversions to take place. Law constituted a foundational building block of this process: Indian Ocean merchants drew on a deep well of legal concepts and forms as they attempted to make their worlds legible to one another, mobilizing the grammars of law to bridge commercial systems. We situate these dynamics within the context of the Indian Ocean ‘bazaar’, establishing it as a site for thinking about the place of cross-cultural trade in world history, and the histories of global capitalism more broadly. We suggest that Euro-American capitalism’s very agents had to adapt their commerce to the idioms, logics, and contracts of their business partners around the Indian Ocean – a vernacular world of the bazaar that was itself already in motion.

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Into the bazaar: Indian Ocean vernaculars in the age of global capitalism

Bishara¹,

Wint²

2020

Journal of Global History

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Islamic Legal Records and Social Histories of Muslims in Ethiopia and Eritrea

Miran

2024

Africa as Method

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Nwando Achebe. Female Monarchs and Merchant Queens in Africa. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2020. 224 pp. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $16.95. Paper. ISBN: 978-0-8214-2407-0.

Alozie¹

2021

Afr. Stud. Rev.

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Have you ever heard of small but mighty? Female Monarchs aptly fits that description. Traveling through time and across the African continent in a roughly chronological order, Nwando Achebe uses a slew of case studies to (re)frame and (re)tell the African-gendered narrative in solidly Africancentered and gendered terms. Breaking from Western perspectives and relying on distinctly African-derived sources and methods, she weaves together the worlds and experiences of African females who occupied positions of power, authority, and influence. In Female Monarchs, the author not only restores voice and dignity to a people but also places elite African women at the center of ancient and contemporary history.At the core of her thesis is the phenomenon of "gendered males" and "gendered females," which refers to the way that the interconnected universe allows biological males to transform themselves into females and biological females to transform themselves into males. Achebe argues that "these transformations are encouraged by a milieu that recognizes that biological sex and gender do not coincide; that gender is a social construct and is flexible and fluid, allowing biological women to become gendered men, and biological men, gendered women" (24). This phenomenon gives rise to distinctive African categories such as female husbands, male priestesses, female headmen, female kings, and female pharaohs. All of which the author expertly explores. Achebe's portrayal of their combined power, authority, and influence leads to an analogous examination of contemporary African women as prominent political officeholders, religious leaders, and entrepreneurs.Female Monarchs starts off with an introduction contextualizing the authority, influence, and power of African women. The first two chapters account for the two realities of African cosmology: the physical world of humans and the invisible, spiritual realm of gods, goddesses, and occult forces. The author locates the sources of female spiritual and ritual powers within various African communities and documents the lives of a representative sample of African princesses, queens, and queen mothers such as

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Women’s Legal Agency and Property in the Court Records of Late Nineteenth-Century Brava

Cited by 3 publications

References 25 publications

Into the bazaar: Indian Ocean vernaculars in the age of global capitalism

Into the bazaar: Indian Ocean vernaculars in the age of global capitalism

Islamic Legal Records and Social Histories of Muslims in Ethiopia and Eritrea

Nwando Achebe. Female Monarchs and Merchant Queens in Africa. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2020. 224 pp. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $16.95. Paper. ISBN: 978-0-8214-2407-0.

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