World History: Journeys from Past to Present

About this product Key Features Author s. Publication Data Place of Publication. List of Illustrations and Acknowledgements. World History in Motion 2.

Transformations in World History 3. Cities and City Life in World History 4. Gender, Family and Household 8. Lineage, Clientage and Caste 9.

Connections Across Land and Sea Building a World System 14 Traditions and their Transformations Material Worlds and Social Lives The African resistance to colonial rule was not surprising. The resistance to the French was best characterized by the African leader known as Samori Ture who defeated the heavy artillery of the French several times in the s and s. The Akan people of Ghana have created some of West Africa's most powerful forest states and empires, beginning around the fourteenth century and culminating in the Asante Empire in the late seventeenth century.

What colonialism meant to the colonized of the former Asante empire has only recently been the subject of historians' interests. Key to viewing the history of colonialism from the perspective of the African family has been the use of oral traditions. One of the pitfalls of teaching about the globalization of slavery and colonial exploitation is fielding the reactions to over-simplistic stories of Africans as victims.

This is sometimes best accomplished by a focus on African daily life at the level of family rather than through the political economy of empire. Jean Allman's and Victoria Tashjian's fine book: Especially important were the ways in which women as both producers and reproducers gained agency and empowerment. Probably the most important institution in an Asante woman's life was not the state but the family.

Central to Akan historical and personal identity was the matrilineal structure of society centered on the abusua a term which refers to family or matrilineage as well as clan. Matrilineal descent in Akan society indicates the pattern by which Akan men and women marked their place in the continuum of ancestors by reference to the female side of the family. Matrilineages carried no special implications for the distribution of political power which as elsewhere in large-scale states worked in favor of men. The Akan concern with fertility and bearing children was a recognition of the importance of the abusua in acquiring individual and community identity.

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Individuals had recognized rights only through their positions within an abusua. Without the protection afforded to members, they were considered without ancestors and even without sexual identity. The uncertainty and ambiguity inherent in the lack of ancestry and status are best exemplified by the fact that enemies captured by the expanding Akan state became permanent slaves unless they were integrated into an abusua through adoption. During the expansion of the Asante state from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, neither women nor children gained position or power.

Some historians have noted that the emphasis on warfare resulted in men gaining status, and the increased numbers of slaves available to perform household tasks generally devalued women's labor and diminished their influence even further. Oral traditions illustrate the high status and importance associated with motherhood in matrilineal societies, even those in which women are politically subordinated.

Children had relatively few rights since knowledge and power that were considered to be the basis of rights were thought to accumulate with age. Still, children were accorded respect because they were believed to be the reincarnation of ancestors. Children reflected spiritual harmony, ideals of individual beauty, and the well-being of the family order. The extent to which such a unit as the household-family was mediated by the Akan state or local political authority varied according to the status of its members.

Typically, interference in the creation of marriage alliances allowed a patriarchy to control the labor of women and their children and thus the accumulation of any household surplus. Even when wealth was inherited through the female line, most women were excluded from most political offices.

Exceptions were made for elite Akan women who were beyond their childbearing years. The female office of queen mother was secondary to that of the king, but she was omnipresent and the final arbiter in the ascension of the new head of state. Women acted as priestesses and even diplomats who made significant contributions to statecraft and foreign policy.

World History and the Individual African. My own research on the family history of a remarkable enslaved woman called Nienna in colonial Asante has illustrated something of the complexity of identity and status within the family then and ever since.

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The adoption of female slaves by an abusua could be undertaken in a variety of ways. Nienna's story illustrates the manner in which marriage by an inherited slave following the death of her husband helped legitimize the subsequent descendants' belonging to an abusua in this case, Atoase. Nienna was born into the royal family of Bona in territory claimed by French authorities in the final decade s of slavery.

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She was captured as a slave sometime around the s. The family's story relates that the young Nienna was walking in the town in front of her guardian when she was kidnapped and taken to Sunyani, a town across the border in the Gold Coast. As a member of the Bona royal household, she would not often have been seen outside the royal compound.

Forging a Global Community The New Imperialism and New Nationalisms, Global Order and Disorder: War and Peace Resistance and Revolution in the Long Twentieth Century Technology and the Environment Reviews "Authors Candace Goucher and Linda Walton have come up with a concise readable narrative of world history from CE to the present that works well for a survey course A good comprehensive narrative history replete with good maps and a writing style that draws students in and makes the study of world history relevant.