Thaddeus Sunseri
Biographic Data
| ID | 87492 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Thaddeus Sunseri |
| GIVEN NAMES | Thaddeus |
| FAMILY NAME | Sunseri |
| SIGNATURE | SUNSERI T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Colorado State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1689-7671 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 122 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1986 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Animal Trauma and the Creation of a Rinderpest Epidemic in German East Africa
In 1912 officials in German East Africa reported that rinderpest, the most feared cattle scourge, had invaded for the first time since the 1890s African panzootic. Despite reports that rinderpest had been present in the region for several years, Germans nevertheless considered it an external threat, constructing disease laws accordingly. Modern virologists believe that rinderpest had been enzootic in colonial Tanzania since the 1890s, causing low…
Mobile Monkeys and Modified Microbes
Following the medical breakthroughs of Pasteur and Koch after 1880, the use of simians became pivotal to laboratory research to develop vaccines and cultivate microbes through the technique of serial passage. These innovations fueled research on multiple diseases and unleashed a demand for simians, which died easily in captivity. European and American colonial expansion facilitated a burgeoning market for laboratory animals that intensified hunti…
The politics of rinderpest control on the Kenya–Tanganyika border, c. 1920–1940
The Game Factor
This article examines imperial politics surrounding rinderpest epidemics along the south-western Tanganyikan border, made urgent by the appearance of the virus in migrating wildlife in 1939. Between 1938 and 1945, the British Colonial Office and governments of eastern and southern Africa undertook vaccination campaigns along the Tanganyika–Nyasaland–Northern Rhodesian border with the goal of protecting the cattle of southern Africa. Since the Fir…
The Maji-Maji War, 1905–1907
The Maji-Maji War was a widespread rebellion in southern German East Africa (colonial Tanzania) directed against German officials, Arab administrators, loyalist chiefs, Christian missionaries, Indian, Arab, and Swahili traders, and German settlers. It encompassed a region roughly south of the central railway route from Dar es Salaam to Lake Nyasa. The rebellion stems from a water medicine (Swahili: maji dawa ) that some rebels believed would make…
International Beef Packing in the Age of Empire
From 1906, the Liebig’s Extract of Meat Company (LEMCO), parent of the Oxo and Fray Bentos brands, entered colonial Namibia as an export-oriented ranching and beef-processing enterprise, purchasing pastureland recently emptied by the Nama-Herero war, with the goal of replicating its successful South American operations in Africa. While LEMCO hoped to expand its markets in Germany and South Africa, the German colonial government anticipated that L…
The Rinderpest Campaigns
Reviewed by: The Rinderpest Campaigns: A Virus, Its Vaccines, and Global Development in the Twentieth Century by Amanda Kay McVety Thaddeus Sunseri Amanda Kay McVety. The Rinderpest Campaigns: A Virus, Its Vaccines, and Global Development in the Twentieth Century. Global and International History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. xiv + 294 pp. Ill. $99.99 (978-1-108-42274-1). Rinderpest virus (RPV) was perhaps the most devastating bov…
Medizin und Herrschaft
Medizin und Herrschaft, a contribution to a burgeoning historical literature on malaria in Africa and the wider world, principally examines five urban cases of Imperial German campaigns to eradicate malaria in its colonies of Cameroon and German East Africa and its northwestern periphery of East Frisia. The case studies are all port cities, and all were in various ways manifestations of state modernization projects. Bauche argues that the malaria…
Working in the slaughterhouse
Between 1947 and 1975, Tanganyika Packers Ltd (TPL) was Tanzania’s only export-oriented slaughterhouse and beef-canning factory, a branch of UK-based Liebig’s Extract of Meat Corporation (Lemco), which originated in 1860s Uruguay. Until shortly before TPL was nationalized in 1974, it was a profitable parastatal, employing some 1200 workers, anchoring a working-class community, and providing an outlet for indigenous Tanzanian cattle from open rang…
Blood Trials
From about 1880 to 1920, a culture of medical experimentation promoted blood transfusion as a therapy for severe anemia in Europe, which was applied in German East Africa in 1892 for a case of blackwater fever, a complication of malaria afflicting mainly Europeans. This first case of blood transfusion in Africa, in which an African's blood was transfused into a German official, complicates the dominant narrative that blood transfusions in Africa …
World War II and the Transformation of the Tanzanian Forests
Historians of World War II in Africa have long recognized that the war acted as “a catalyst for social and economic change” within the continent, creating an extraordinary demand for raw materials and some industry, yet intensifying material deprivations and social stresses that contributed to postwar nationalism. The war sparked a development ethos far beyond that of the Depression years, a prelude to the economic boom of the 1950s. Moreover, af…
Leander Schneider. Government of Development
Between 1968 and 1977 the Tanzanian government compelled some thirteen million citizens—about 75 percent of the population—to live in registered villages in a process known as ujamaa (socialist) villagization. Arguably “the most famous case of ambitious economic and social engineering in post-independence Africa” (14); Leander Schneider takes a fresh look at this well-analyzed historical moment that was a colossal failure, even though its goal wa…
The Entangled History of Sadoka (Rinderpest) and Veterinary Science in Tanzania and the Wider World, 1891–1901
Scholarship on the Tanzanian Rinderpest epizootic of the 1890s has assumed that German colonizers understood from the start that they were confronting the same disease that had afflicted Eurasia for centuries. Outward indicators of the epizootic, known locally as sadoka, especially wildlife destruction, were unknown in Europe, leading German veterinarians to doubt that the African disease was Rinderpest. Financial constraints and conflicting deve…
A political ecology of beef in colonial Tanzania and the global periphery, 1864–1961
Exploiting the Urwald
In modern discourse the ‘primeval forest’ evokes a landscape undisturbed by humans, a remnant of the prehistoric past where diverse plant and animal species coexist, where nature persists as it once was. When modern environmentalists refer to the concept, it is often as a call to arms to intervene and protect threatened biodiversity from intruders, usually loggers, peasants, ranchers or hunters.1 However, at the beginning of the twentieth century…
Chapter Three. The War Of The Hunters
In 1905, Hans Paasche, sent to secure the Rufiji River from Maji Maji rebels, encountered a band of suspected rebels armed with muskets just south of the river. This chapter focuses on the decline of elephant hunting and the ivory trade as a factor in the Maji Maji war, it is appropriately discussed alongside other conflicts over environmental control that came with German colonialism. The role of hunters, particularly elephant hunters, in the Ma…
The Political Ecology of the Copal Trade in the Tanzanian Coastal Hinterland, C . 1820–1905
Between 1830 and 1880 copal was the major trade commodity from mainland Tanzania apart from ivory. Unlike ivory, copal was a product of a distinct environment, the lowland forests of the East African coastal hinterland. This region's copal was the best in the world for making high-value carriage varnish. It therefore found a ready market in the West, especially New England, whose traders brought cotton textiles to trade with East Africans for cop…
Every African a Nationalist
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Working in the Mangroves and Beyond
Germans arrived in Tanzania with a vision of scientific forestry derived from European and Asian templates of forest management that was premised on the creation of forest reserves emptied of human settlement. They found a landscape and human environment that was not amenable to established practices of rotational forestry. In particular, a general labour dearth and resistance from Tanzanian peasants and labour migrants forced German foresters to…
Something else to burn
In the last fifteen years, Tanzanian forest policy has embraced an agenda of biodiversity preservation coupled with privatisation that calls for the expansion of state oversight over forests and woodlands. Reflecting the hegemony of conservationist donors and international and local NGOs, and couched in a language of community conservation, this agenda decries peasant intrusion into forest reserves to burn charcoal for the urban market and to exp…
Reinterpreting a Colonial Rebellion
Vilimani
Introduction: peasant & worker agency in Tanzanian history - Industrialisation & the labor question in German East Africa, 1885-1914 - Slavery & the genesis of colonial labor relations - Labor migration & the erosion of the plantation imperative - Environmental collapse, household disruption & rebellion in Rufiji district - An antidote to the plantation labor shortage? The peasant cotton campaign in southeastern Tanzania - Migrant labor & the sha…
Vilimani
The Baumwollfrage
In March 1907, as newly-appointed Colonial Minister Bernhard Dernburg prepared to visit German East Africa to assess the colony's potential for economic development following the recent Maji Maji rebellion, requests poured in from businessmen seeking to accompany the minister. Prominent among the select few allowed on the trip were representatives of the German textile industry interested in founding cotton plantations in the colony. Among those …
Grundbesitz, Landkonflikte und Kolonialer Wandel
Famine and Wild Pigs
Late in 1907 a missionary from Kisserawe in German East Africa complained of a spate of ngoma ritual dances among the Zaramo people. In particular he singled out an ngoma conducted by women to ameliorate a drought that was threatening that year's maize crop. As the women danced around a well, dressed as men and brandishing muskets, they appealed for rain from ‘their god’. Several aspects of this ngoma make it remarkable. It occurred following the…
A political ecology of beef in colonial Tanzania and the global periphery, 1864–1961
Something else to burn
In the last fifteen years, Tanzanian forest policy has embraced an agenda of biodiversity preservation coupled with privatisation that calls for the expansion of state oversight over forests and woodlands. Reflecting the hegemony of conservationist donors and international and local NGOs, and couched in a language of community conservation, this agenda decries peasant intrusion into forest reserves to burn charcoal for the urban market and to exp…
Reinterpreting a Colonial Rebellion
Slave Ransoming in German East Africa, 1885-1922
L'A. etudie les esclaves hommes et femmes (recemment acptures et ceux de la premiere genration) de l'ile de Mafia (Afrique orientale) sous la loi allemande de 1895 a 1992. Il insiste sur les femmes et les facteurs qui influencent leur attitude envers l'hegemonie de leur maitre et sur l'autonomie devenue possible grâce a la « rancon ». Les esclaves n'agissaient pas seulement en tant que dependants des maitres et n'etaient pas facilement manipulabl…
Vilimani
Introduction: peasant & worker agency in Tanzanian history - Industrialisation & the labor question in German East Africa, 1885-1914 - Slavery & the genesis of colonial labor relations - Labor migration & the erosion of the plantation imperative - Environmental collapse, household disruption & rebellion in Rufiji district - An antidote to the plantation labor shortage? The peasant cotton campaign in southeastern Tanzania - Migrant labor & the sha…
Statist Narratives and Maji Maji Ellipses
L'A. examine la genese de l'historiographie de la guerre Maji Maji en Tanzanie a travers trois epoques : dans l'historiographie coloniale allemande puis britannique, dans le recit historique nationaliste et de l'independance ensuite. Il montre comment cette revolte populaire a ete construite en tant que recit etatique. Il met en evidence certains elements de la tradition Maji Maji qui sont contestables, ainsi que d'autres qui n'ont pas trouve leu…
Labour Migration in Colonial Tanzania and the Hegemony of South African Historiography
LABOUR MIGRATION IN COLONIAL TANZANIA AND THE HEGEMONY OF SOUTH AFRICAN HISTORIOGRAPHY Get access THADDEUS SUNSERI THADDEUS SUNSERI Assistant Professor History at Chicago State University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African Affairs, Volume 95, Issue 381, October 1996, Pages 581–598, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.afraf.a007769 Published: 01 October 1996
The Political Ecology of the Copal Trade in the Tanzanian Coastal Hinterland, C . 1820–1905
Between 1830 and 1880 copal was the major trade commodity from mainland Tanzania apart from ivory. Unlike ivory, copal was a product of a distinct environment, the lowland forests of the East African coastal hinterland. This region's copal was the best in the world for making high-value carriage varnish. It therefore found a ready market in the West, especially New England, whose traders brought cotton textiles to trade with East Africans for cop…
Vilimani
The Baumwollfrage
In March 1907, as newly-appointed Colonial Minister Bernhard Dernburg prepared to visit German East Africa to assess the colony's potential for economic development following the recent Maji Maji rebellion, requests poured in from businessmen seeking to accompany the minister. Prominent among the select few allowed on the trip were representatives of the German textile industry interested in founding cotton plantations in the colony. Among those …
Majimaji and the Millennium
Writing thirty years ago the historian of the Majimaji rebellion, Gilbert Gwassa, emphasized the purely Tanzanian nature of the uprising, as seen in the ideology which he believed was the inspiration for the widespread war against German colonialism. To Gwassa, southern Tanzanians created an innovative, secular ideology after the turn of the twentieth century which enabled Africans to resist German colonialism supra-ethnically rather than locally…
The Entangled History of Sadoka (Rinderpest) and Veterinary Science in Tanzania and the Wider World, 1891–1901
Scholarship on the Tanzanian Rinderpest epizootic of the 1890s has assumed that German colonizers understood from the start that they were confronting the same disease that had afflicted Eurasia for centuries. Outward indicators of the epizootic, known locally as sadoka, especially wildlife destruction, were unknown in Europe, leading German veterinarians to doubt that the African disease was Rinderpest. Financial constraints and conflicting deve…
Exploiting the Urwald
In modern discourse the ‘primeval forest’ evokes a landscape undisturbed by humans, a remnant of the prehistoric past where diverse plant and animal species coexist, where nature persists as it once was. When modern environmentalists refer to the concept, it is often as a call to arms to intervene and protect threatened biodiversity from intruders, usually loggers, peasants, ranchers or hunters.1 However, at the beginning of the twentieth century…
Every African a Nationalist
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Working in the Mangroves and Beyond
Germans arrived in Tanzania with a vision of scientific forestry derived from European and Asian templates of forest management that was premised on the creation of forest reserves emptied of human settlement. They found a landscape and human environment that was not amenable to established practices of rotational forestry. In particular, a general labour dearth and resistance from Tanzanian peasants and labour migrants forced German foresters to…
Dispersing the Fields
Au début de l’epoque coloniale, les observateurs ont remarqué que l’utilisation de la terre en Tanzanie occidentale avait changé considérablement, s’éloignant des modèles du dix-neuvième siècle. La restructuration du paysage est due essentiellement à une réaction des paysannes vis-à-vis d’une transformation drastique de la division de travail. En effet, les hommes Nyamwezi gravitaient autour le Central Railway pour participer à l’économie de sala…
International Beef Packing in the Age of Empire
From 1906, the Liebig’s Extract of Meat Company (LEMCO), parent of the Oxo and Fray Bentos brands, entered colonial Namibia as an export-oriented ranching and beef-processing enterprise, purchasing pastureland recently emptied by the Nama-Herero war, with the goal of replicating its successful South American operations in Africa. While LEMCO hoped to expand its markets in Germany and South Africa, the German colonial government anticipated that L…
Koloniale Entwicklung im Bezirksamt Lindi (Deutsch-Ostafrika)
The Maji-Maji War, 1905–1907
The Maji-Maji War was a widespread rebellion in southern German East Africa (colonial Tanzania) directed against German officials, Arab administrators, loyalist chiefs, Christian missionaries, Indian, Arab, and Swahili traders, and German settlers. It encompassed a region roughly south of the central railway route from Dar es Salaam to Lake Nyasa. The rebellion stems from a water medicine (Swahili: maji dawa ) that some rebels believed would make…
Nama/Namibia
Slave Ransoming in German East Africa, 1885-1922
L'A. etudie les esclaves hommes et femmes (recemment acptures et ceux de la premiere genration) de l'ile de Mafia (Afrique orientale) sous la loi allemande de 1895 a 1992. Il insiste sur les femmes et les facteurs qui influencent leur attitude envers l'hegemonie de leur maitre et sur l'autonomie devenue possible grâce a la « rancon ». Les esclaves n'agissaient pas seulement en tant que dependants des maitres et n'etaient pas facilement manipulabl…
Nicht als Abentheurer bin ich Hierhergekommen
Labour Migration in Colonial Tanzania and the Hegemony of South African Historiography
LABOUR MIGRATION IN COLONIAL TANZANIA AND THE HEGEMONY OF SOUTH AFRICAN HISTORIOGRAPHY Get access THADDEUS SUNSERI THADDEUS SUNSERI Assistant Professor History at Chicago State University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African Affairs, Volume 95, Issue 381, October 1996, Pages 581–598, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.afraf.a007769 Published: 01 October 1996
Koloniale Entwicklung im Bezirksamt Lindi (Deutsch-Ostafrika)
Famine and Wild Pigs
Late in 1907 a missionary from Kisserawe in German East Africa complained of a spate of ngoma ritual dances among the Zaramo people. In particular he singled out an ngoma conducted by women to ameliorate a drought that was threatening that year's maize crop. As the women danced around a well, dressed as men and brandishing muskets, they appealed for rain from ‘their god’. Several aspects of this ngoma make it remarkable. It occurred following the…
Development for Exploitation
Development for Exploitation: German colonial policies in mainland Tanzania, 1884–1914 Get access Development for Exploitation: German colonial policies in mainland Tanzania, 1884–1914, by Juhani Koponen. Finish Historical Society Studia Historica 49, 1995. 741 pp. £19.95 paperback. ISBN 951 710 005 1. THADDEUS SUNSERI THADDEUS SUNSERI Chicago State University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African Affair…
Politik Zwischen den Zeilen
Dispersing the Fields
Au début de l’epoque coloniale, les observateurs ont remarqué que l’utilisation de la terre en Tanzanie occidentale avait changé considérablement, s’éloignant des modèles du dix-neuvième siècle. La restructuration du paysage est due essentiellement à une réaction des paysannes vis-à-vis d’une transformation drastique de la division de travail. En effet, les hommes Nyamwezi gravitaient autour le Central Railway pour participer à l’économie de sala…
The Moravian, Berlin, and Leipzig Mission Archives in Eastern Germany
The reunification of the Germanies in 1990 has opened up research opportunities for historians of Africa. While research in East German archives was possible for Western scholars during the Cold War, conditions for research were not as easy or affordable as they currently are. Intent on obtaining foreign exchange, East German authorities channeled Western researchers to expensive hotels and limited the number of files a researcher could see in a …
Majimaji and the Millennium
Writing thirty years ago the historian of the Majimaji rebellion, Gilbert Gwassa, emphasized the purely Tanzanian nature of the uprising, as seen in the ideology which he believed was the inspiration for the widespread war against German colonialism. To Gwassa, southern Tanzanians created an innovative, secular ideology after the turn of the twentieth century which enabled Africans to resist German colonialism supra-ethnically rather than locally…
Grundbesitz, Landkonflikte und Kolonialer Wandel
Statist Narratives and Maji Maji Ellipses
L'A. examine la genese de l'historiographie de la guerre Maji Maji en Tanzanie a travers trois epoques : dans l'historiographie coloniale allemande puis britannique, dans le recit historique nationaliste et de l'independance ensuite. Il montre comment cette revolte populaire a ete construite en tant que recit etatique. Il met en evidence certains elements de la tradition Maji Maji qui sont contestables, ainsi que d'autres qui n'ont pas trouve leu…
The Baumwollfrage
In March 1907, as newly-appointed Colonial Minister Bernhard Dernburg prepared to visit German East Africa to assess the colony's potential for economic development following the recent Maji Maji rebellion, requests poured in from businessmen seeking to accompany the minister. Prominent among the select few allowed on the trip were representatives of the German textile industry interested in founding cotton plantations in the colony. Among those …
Vilimani
Reinterpreting a Colonial Rebellion
Vilimani
Introduction: peasant & worker agency in Tanzanian history - Industrialisation & the labor question in German East Africa, 1885-1914 - Slavery & the genesis of colonial labor relations - Labor migration & the erosion of the plantation imperative - Environmental collapse, household disruption & rebellion in Rufiji district - An antidote to the plantation labor shortage? The peasant cotton campaign in southeastern Tanzania - Migrant labor & the sha…
Working in the Mangroves and Beyond
Germans arrived in Tanzania with a vision of scientific forestry derived from European and Asian templates of forest management that was premised on the creation of forest reserves emptied of human settlement. They found a landscape and human environment that was not amenable to established practices of rotational forestry. In particular, a general labour dearth and resistance from Tanzanian peasants and labour migrants forced German foresters to…
Something else to burn
In the last fifteen years, Tanzanian forest policy has embraced an agenda of biodiversity preservation coupled with privatisation that calls for the expansion of state oversight over forests and woodlands. Reflecting the hegemony of conservationist donors and international and local NGOs, and couched in a language of community conservation, this agenda decries peasant intrusion into forest reserves to burn charcoal for the urban market and to exp…
The Political Ecology of the Copal Trade in the Tanzanian Coastal Hinterland, C . 1820–1905
Between 1830 and 1880 copal was the major trade commodity from mainland Tanzania apart from ivory. Unlike ivory, copal was a product of a distinct environment, the lowland forests of the East African coastal hinterland. This region's copal was the best in the world for making high-value carriage varnish. It therefore found a ready market in the West, especially New England, whose traders brought cotton textiles to trade with East Africans for cop…
Every African a Nationalist
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Chapter Three. The War Of The Hunters
In 1905, Hans Paasche, sent to secure the Rufiji River from Maji Maji rebels, encountered a band of suspected rebels armed with muskets just south of the river. This chapter focuses on the decline of elephant hunting and the ivory trade as a factor in the Maji Maji war, it is appropriately discussed alongside other conflicts over environmental control that came with German colonialism. The role of hunters, particularly elephant hunters, in the Ma…
A political ecology of beef in colonial Tanzania and the global periphery, 1864–1961
Exploiting the Urwald
In modern discourse the ‘primeval forest’ evokes a landscape undisturbed by humans, a remnant of the prehistoric past where diverse plant and animal species coexist, where nature persists as it once was. When modern environmentalists refer to the concept, it is often as a call to arms to intervene and protect threatened biodiversity from intruders, usually loggers, peasants, ranchers or hunters.1 However, at the beginning of the twentieth century…
World War II and the Transformation of the Tanzanian Forests
Historians of World War II in Africa have long recognized that the war acted as “a catalyst for social and economic change” within the continent, creating an extraordinary demand for raw materials and some industry, yet intensifying material deprivations and social stresses that contributed to postwar nationalism. The war sparked a development ethos far beyond that of the Depression years, a prelude to the economic boom of the 1950s. Moreover, af…
Political science (28 works) · Geography (26 works) · African history and culture studies (25 works) · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories (25 works) · Colonialism (24 works) · Archaeology (19 works) · History (18 works) · Law (18 works) · Economics (14 works) · German (14 works)