Benedetta Rossi
Biographic Data
| ID | 3586110 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Benedetta Rossi |
| GIVEN NAMES | Benedetta |
| FAMILY NAME | Rossi |
| SIGNATURE | ROSSI B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Birmingham |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9292-7791 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 58 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Introduction: African Approaches to the Abolition of Slavery
Abolitionism is considered one of the few genuinely global humanitarian movements. And yet approaches to slavery’s abolition in Africa, Asia and parts of Latin America are understudied and scarcely understood. The silence on African abolitionism in reference works is telling. Volume Four of the Cambridge World History of Slavery contains an entire section dedicated to abolition, but only one article on “Slavery and Abolition in Islamic Africa” by…
Introduction: Approches africaines de l’abolition de l’esclavage
L’abolitionnisme est considéré comme l’un des rares mouvements humanitaires véritablement mondiaux. Pourtant, les approches de l’abolition de l’esclavage en Afrique, en Asie et dans certaines parties de l’Amérique latine sont peu étudiées et peu comprises. Le silence des ouvrages de référence sur l’abolition de l’esclavage en Afrique est révélateur. Le volume quatre de la Cambridge World History of Slavery contient une section entière consacrée à…
The Abolition of Slavery in Africa's Legal Histories
This introduction contextualizes the special issue's articles in the broader continental dynamics. It discusses the Eurocentric bias of the historiography and suggests that the view that Europe was responsible for the legal abolition of slavery in Africa should be nuanced and qualified. Some independent African polities abolished slavery before Europe's colonial occupation. Nowhere did European abolitionists encounter a tabula rasa: African polit…
An Abolitionist Vicious Circle: Slaving, Antislavery, and Violence on the Shores of Lake Tanganyika at the Onset of Colonial Occupation
In the late nineteenth century, abolitionists felt entitled to use all possible means to save the African victims of the slave trade. As European imperialism rose, abolitionism legitimized interventionism. This article explores how a major humanitarian movement could sanction colonial occupation and the violence that accompanied it. It also examines the position of African slaveholders who resisted the entrenchment of European rule and defended a…
Tra filosofia e diritto / Persone nel mondo sociale / Paradossi del realismo politico
Latent Tuberculosis Infection in Haematopoietic Stem Cell Transplant Recipients: A Retrospective Italian Cohort Study in Tor Vergata University Hospital, Rome
The results of tuberculosis (TB) screening and reactivation in a cohort of 323 adult patients undergoing haematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) from 2015 to 2019 at the University Hospital of Tor Vergata, Rome, Italy, were reported. A total of 260 patients, 59 (18.3%) autologous and 264 (81.7%) allogeneic transplants, underwent Interferon Release (IFN)-γ (IGRA) test screening: 228 (87.7%) were negative, 11 (4.2%) indeterminate and 21 (8.…
Captive Wives or Conjugal Slaves? The Slavery-Marriage Nexus in Northern Uganda Since the Mid-Nineteenth Century
This article examines transformations in the marriage-slavery nexus in Northern Uganda from the late nineteenth century to the present. By historicizing the forced marriage of abducted girls in the Lord’s Resistance Army, the article contributes to explaining why the interpretation of these circumstances has been so disputed in Uganda and internationally. It starts by examining different interpretations of the relationship between Dominic Ongwen …
Slavery and Marriage in African Societies
This article introduces a special issue focusing upon linkages between enslavement and marriage within African societies from the 1830s to the present day. The right to make decisions over marriage is one of the core powers which masters have historically exercised over individuals whom they enslaved. The exercise of this right had far-reaching ramifications for lived experiences of enslavement, with slaves – usually women and girls – being force…
What if… ?. Les femmes ou la double domination
n avril 1862, son arrive Gallabat ( la frontire actuelle entre le Soudan et l'thiopie) l'explorateur anglais Samuel Baker visite un march d'esclaves o sont exposes de nombreuses et ravissantes captives, la belle carnation sombre, aux traits dlicats et aux yeux de gazelle (cf.ds le txt p. 00).Vendues par des trafiquants locaux et destines des harems, elles tmoignent d'un commerce d'esclaves alors bien tabli qui met en contact l'Abyssinie et le Sou…
Promises and Pitfalls of Global Comparisons: Slavery in West African Political Cultures
Taking cue from Paul Lovejoy's criticism of the dichotomies of centralized and decentralized societies, and Slave Societies and Societies with Slaves, this article contextualizes Lovejoy's arguments within broader debates on historical comparisons in global slavery studies. It examines a case of slave trade that involved negotiations between actors belonging to different political cultures in regions west of Lake Chad in the 1920s through 1940s. …
Promises and Pitfalls of Global Comparisons: Slavery in West African Political Cultures
Taking cue from Paul Lovejoy’s criticism of the dichotomies of centralized and decentralized societies, and Slave Societies and Societies with Slaves, this article contextualizes Lovejoy’s arguments within broader debates on historical comparisons in global slavery studies. It examines a case of slave trade that involved negotiations between actors belonging to different political cultures in regions west of Lake Chad in the 1920s through 1940s. …
Reflections on public slavery and social death
It is tempting to see public slaves as sharing characteristics of both slave and free and, therefore, as embodying an intermediate position that proves binary approaches to slavery and freedom wrong. This article argues that this temptation should be resisted. Based on an analysis of cases from different regions and periods, it agrees broadly with Patterson's clear distinction between slave and free statuses, but not with his interpretation of el…
From Slavery? Rethinking Slave Descent as an Analytical Category: The Case of the Mauritanian and Moroccan Ḥarāṭīn
Que signifie, après l’abolition mondiale de l’esclavage, le fait de définir des groupes ou des individus comme des « descendants d’esclaves » ? Lorsque l’esclavage était légal, les lois et les normes faisaient la distinction entre le statut juridique d’esclave et de celui d’homme ou de femme libre, et définissaient les relations de production, de reproduction et de propriété entre les personnes asservies et leurs propriétaires. Aujourd’hui, la te…
Beyond the Atlantic Paradigm: Slavery and Abolitionism in the Nigerien Sahel
This article investigates the causes of the resilience of slavery in the region of Tahoua in the Republic of Niger in the West African Sahel. It attributes slavery’s lingering vitality to the semi-autonomous evolution of slavery and abolitionism in this region. It illustrates the historical processes through which, following colonial legal abolition, slavery in Tahoua started being challenged, but not effectively eradicated. The article shows tha…
Camille LEFEBVRE. Frontières de sable, frontières de papier: Histoire de territoires et de frontières, du jihad de Sokoto à la colonisation française du Niger, XIX e -XX e siècles . Paris, Publication…
site ou, le cas chant, des conditions gnrales de la licence souscrite par votre tablissement
Migration History and Historiography
Migration has been a central factor in African history. It is likely that the human species started spreading on the planet within and outside of Africa between 2 and 2.5 million years ago. Although the earliest stages of human migrations are the subject of intense debate, most hypotheses concentrate on movements that occurred in the African continent. In historical times, African migrations can be divided into two broad sub-fields looking at, re…
Landscapes, Sources and Intellectual Projects of the West African Past: Essays in Honour of Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias
Landscapes, Sources and Intellectual Projects of the West African Past offers a comprehensive assessment of new directions in the historiography of West Africa. With twenty-four chapters by leading researchers in the study of West African history and cultures, the volume examines the main trends in multiple fields including the critical interpretation of Arabic sources; new archaeological surveys of trans-Saharan trade; the discovery of sources i…
Freedom under Scrutiny
Periodizing the End of Slavery: Colonial Law, the League of Nations, and Slave Resistance in the Nigerien Sahel, 1920s–1930s
When, how, and why—if at all—did slavery end in the Nigerien Sahel? What processes facilitated the emancipation of enslaved persons? What were the strategies of colonial administrators, slave-owners, slave-traders, slaves, and slave descendants? In the first two decades following France’s occupation of the Central Sahel, legal abolition did not lead to the suppression of slavery, because laws were not at first enforced. But in the 1920s the inter…
From Unfree Work to Working for Free: Labor, Aid, and Gender in the Nigerien Sahel, 1930–2000
This article focuses on the consequences of twentieth-century developmentalism for labor practices in the Nigerien Sahel under French rule and in the postindependence period. It examines labor regime transformations at the desert's edge; the ways in which state-led developmentalism influenced labor relations; and gender disparities in the history of emancipation from slavery. Following the abolition of forced labor in 1946, the rhetoric of human …
What "Development" Does to Work
This article introduces an Africa-focused special issue showing that the rise of development in its modern form coincided with the demise of the political legitimacy of forced labor. It argues that by mobilizing the idea of development, both colonial and independent African governments were able to continue recruiting unpaid (or underpaid) labor-relabeled as "voluntary participation," "self-help," or "human investment" -after the passing of the I…
Périodiser la fin de l'esclavage: Le droit colonial, la Société des Nations et la résistance des esclaves dans le Sahel nigérien, 1920-1930
Quand, comment et pourquoi l'esclavage a-t-il disparu dans le Sahel nigérien - si tant est qu'il ait complètement disparu ? Quels processus ont favorisé l'émancipation des personnes réduites en esclavage ? Quelles étaient les stratégies des administrateurs coloniaux, des propriétaires d'esclaves, des trafiquants, des esclaves eux-mêmes et de leurs descendants ? Au cours des deux premières décennies de l'occupation française du Sahel central, l'ab…
Dependence, Unfreedom and Slavery in Africa: Towards an Integrated Analysis
The three books reviewed in this article seek to provide interpretations of dependence, unfreedom and slavery in African societies. But they reach different conclusions; bring different methodological frameworks to bear on the circumstances they examine; and - when they are concerned with policy questions - propose different remedies. A comparison of these books is useful not only for understanding African dependence and unfreedom, but also for r…
From Slavery to Aid: Politics, Labour, and Ecology in the Nigerien Sahel, 1800–2000
From Slavery to Aid engages two major themes in African historiography, the slow death of slavery and the evolution of international development, and reveals their interrelation in the social history of the region of Ader in the Nigerien Sahel. Benedetta Rossi traces the historical transformations that turned a society where slavery was a fundamental institution into one governed by the goals and methods of 'aid'. Over an impressive sweep of time…
The Agadez Chronicles and Y Tarichi: A Reinterpretation
This article focuses on the texts known as the “Agadez Chronicles” and “Y Tarichi,” which have been used by historians of the Central Sahara and Sahel to reconstruct the history of the Sultanate of Agadez and the Ader Kingdom in today’s Republic of Niger. The most frequently cited of these texts are published translations of copies of Arabic manuscripts that were made available to French and British colonial administrators by members of the elite…
Migration and Emancipation in West Africa's Labour History: The Missing Links
Strategies of emancipation included projects of migration conceived and unfolded by migrants of slave descent. This article suggests that looking at how these migrants chose to move when they could control their mobility, and at the obstacles they faced, reveals aspects of the experience of enslavement and emancipation that have not yet been fully explored in the relevant historiography. While historians of African slavery have described the larg…
Order and Disjuncture: Theoretical Shifts in the Anthropology of Aid and Development
Dependence, Unfreedom and Slavery in Africa: Towards an Integrated Analysis
The three books reviewed in this article seek to provide interpretations of dependence, unfreedom and slavery in African societies. But they reach different conclusions; bring different methodological frameworks to bear on the circumstances they examine; and - when they are concerned with policy questions - propose different remedies. A comparison of these books is useful not only for understanding African dependence and unfreedom, but also for r…
Being and Becoming Hausa: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Drawing on anthropology, linguistics, economic history, and archaeology, this book offers a compelling portrait of the emergence and evolution of Hausa identity in West Africa
What "Development" Does to Work
This article introduces an Africa-focused special issue showing that the rise of development in its modern form coincided with the demise of the political legitimacy of forced labor. It argues that by mobilizing the idea of development, both colonial and independent African governments were able to continue recruiting unpaid (or underpaid) labor-relabeled as "voluntary participation," "self-help," or "human investment" -after the passing of the I…
Slavery and Marriage in African Societies
This article introduces a special issue focusing upon linkages between enslavement and marriage within African societies from the 1830s to the present day. The right to make decisions over marriage is one of the core powers which masters have historically exercised over individuals whom they enslaved. The exercise of this right had far-reaching ramifications for lived experiences of enslavement, with slaves – usually women and girls – being force…
Promises and Pitfalls of Global Comparisons: Slavery in West African Political Cultures
Taking cue from Paul Lovejoy's criticism of the dichotomies of centralized and decentralized societies, and Slave Societies and Societies with Slaves, this article contextualizes Lovejoy's arguments within broader debates on historical comparisons in global slavery studies. It examines a case of slave trade that involved negotiations between actors belonging to different political cultures in regions west of Lake Chad in the 1920s through 1940s. …
Landscapes, Sources and Intellectual Projects of the West African Past: Essays in Honour of Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias
Landscapes, Sources and Intellectual Projects of the West African Past offers a comprehensive assessment of new directions in the historiography of West Africa. With twenty-four chapters by leading researchers in the study of West African history and cultures, the volume examines the main trends in multiple fields including the critical interpretation of Arabic sources; new archaeological surveys of trans-Saharan trade; the discovery of sources i…
From Slavery? Rethinking Slave Descent as an Analytical Category: The Case of the Mauritanian and Moroccan Ḥarāṭīn
Que signifie, après l’abolition mondiale de l’esclavage, le fait de définir des groupes ou des individus comme des « descendants d’esclaves » ? Lorsque l’esclavage était légal, les lois et les normes faisaient la distinction entre le statut juridique d’esclave et de celui d’homme ou de femme libre, et définissaient les relations de production, de reproduction et de propriété entre les personnes asservies et leurs propriétaires. Aujourd’hui, la te…
Freedom under Scrutiny
Périodiser la fin de l'esclavage: Le droit colonial, la Société des Nations et la résistance des esclaves dans le Sahel nigérien, 1920-1930
Quand, comment et pourquoi l'esclavage a-t-il disparu dans le Sahel nigérien - si tant est qu'il ait complètement disparu ? Quels processus ont favorisé l'émancipation des personnes réduites en esclavage ? Quelles étaient les stratégies des administrateurs coloniaux, des propriétaires d'esclaves, des trafiquants, des esclaves eux-mêmes et de leurs descendants ? Au cours des deux premières décennies de l'occupation française du Sahel central, l'ab…
The Agadez Chronicles and Y Tarichi: A Reinterpretation
This article focuses on the texts known as the “Agadez Chronicles” and “Y Tarichi,” which have been used by historians of the Central Sahara and Sahel to reconstruct the history of the Sultanate of Agadez and the Ader Kingdom in today’s Republic of Niger. The most frequently cited of these texts are published translations of copies of Arabic manuscripts that were made available to French and British colonial administrators by members of the elite…
General
Revisiting Foucauldian Approaches: Power Dynamics in Development Projects
This article sets out to rethink the usefulness of some aspects of the work of Michel Foucault to the study of development. Drawing on the detailed ethnography of a development consultancy, it focuses on how change was induced in an important and long-standing rural development project in West Africa. Foucauldian approaches provide a valuable conceptual framework for unravelling the regimes of rationality underpinning development institutions and…
Order and Disjuncture: Theoretical Shifts in the Anthropology of Aid and Development
Reconfiguring Slavery: West African Trajectories
This book focuses on the range of trajectories followed by slavery as an institution since the various abolitions of the nineteenth century. It also considers the continuing and multi-faceted strategies that descendants of both owners and slaves have developed to make what use they can of their forebears' social positions, or to distance themselves from them. The book contains both anthropological and historical contributions that present empiric…
Being and Becoming Hausa: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Tuareg Trajectories of Slavery: Preliminary Reflections on a Changing Field
Being And Becoming Hausa In Ader
This chapter focuses on Hausa identity in Ader: how it is represented in local ethnic discourse; how it is performed in distinctive ways of living; and how it can be acquired in the process of becoming Hausa. The changing social implications of ethnicity are illustrated in the chapter with reference to the recent history of the village of Agouloum in the district of Tamaske. A closer look at the history of Agouloums population in the last one hun…
Hausa Identity: Language, History And Religion
This introductory chapter explores the central structuring themes of this book, and then moves on to an overview of the main threads emerging in the different chapters. The book explores how being Hausa has manifested itself through time, what were the cultural and material outcomes of this process, and which groups were involved. The study of Hausa history offers a stimulating platform for the investigation of notions of identity. Hausa has been…
Being and Becoming Hausa: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Drawing on anthropology, linguistics, economic history, and archaeology, this book offers a compelling portrait of the emergence and evolution of Hausa identity in West Africa
Without History? Interrogating “Slave” Memories in Ader (Niger)
Migration and Emancipation in West Africa's Labour History: The Missing Links
Strategies of emancipation included projects of migration conceived and unfolded by migrants of slave descent. This article suggests that looking at how these migrants chose to move when they could control their mobility, and at the obstacles they faced, reveals aspects of the experience of enslavement and emancipation that have not yet been fully explored in the relevant historiography. While historians of African slavery have described the larg…
Tubali's trip: Rethinking informality in the study of West African labour migrations
This article focuses on the work and travels of Tubali, a Hausa-speaking migrant from the region of Tahoua in the Republic of Niger. In a journey that lasted four years and took him across Niger, Nigeria, Cameroun, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and the Republic of the Congo, Tubali operated in contexts usually characterised as “informal”: he travelled without documents or work permits, and was supported by institutions that elude state control and yet…
Trafficking in Slavery's Wake: Law and the Experience of Women and Children in Africa
From Slavery to Aid: Politics, Labour, and Ecology in the Nigerien Sahel, 1800–2000
From Slavery to Aid engages two major themes in African historiography, the slow death of slavery and the evolution of international development, and reveals their interrelation in the social history of the region of Ader in the Nigerien Sahel. Benedetta Rossi traces the historical transformations that turned a society where slavery was a fundamental institution into one governed by the goals and methods of 'aid'. Over an impressive sweep of time…
The Agadez Chronicles and Y Tarichi: A Reinterpretation
This article focuses on the texts known as the “Agadez Chronicles” and “Y Tarichi,” which have been used by historians of the Central Sahara and Sahel to reconstruct the history of the Sultanate of Agadez and the Ader Kingdom in today’s Republic of Niger. The most frequently cited of these texts are published translations of copies of Arabic manuscripts that were made available to French and British colonial administrators by members of the elite…
Dependence, Unfreedom and Slavery in Africa: Towards an Integrated Analysis
The three books reviewed in this article seek to provide interpretations of dependence, unfreedom and slavery in African societies. But they reach different conclusions; bring different methodological frameworks to bear on the circumstances they examine; and - when they are concerned with policy questions - propose different remedies. A comparison of these books is useful not only for understanding African dependence and unfreedom, but also for r…
Freedom under Scrutiny
Periodizing the End of Slavery: Colonial Law, the League of Nations, and Slave Resistance in the Nigerien Sahel, 1920s–1930s
When, how, and why—if at all—did slavery end in the Nigerien Sahel? What processes facilitated the emancipation of enslaved persons? What were the strategies of colonial administrators, slave-owners, slave-traders, slaves, and slave descendants? In the first two decades following France’s occupation of the Central Sahel, legal abolition did not lead to the suppression of slavery, because laws were not at first enforced. But in the 1920s the inter…
From Unfree Work to Working for Free: Labor, Aid, and Gender in the Nigerien Sahel, 1930–2000
This article focuses on the consequences of twentieth-century developmentalism for labor practices in the Nigerien Sahel under French rule and in the postindependence period. It examines labor regime transformations at the desert's edge; the ways in which state-led developmentalism influenced labor relations; and gender disparities in the history of emancipation from slavery. Following the abolition of forced labor in 1946, the rhetoric of human …
What "Development" Does to Work
This article introduces an Africa-focused special issue showing that the rise of development in its modern form coincided with the demise of the political legitimacy of forced labor. It argues that by mobilizing the idea of development, both colonial and independent African governments were able to continue recruiting unpaid (or underpaid) labor-relabeled as "voluntary participation," "self-help," or "human investment" -after the passing of the I…
Périodiser la fin de l'esclavage: Le droit colonial, la Société des Nations et la résistance des esclaves dans le Sahel nigérien, 1920-1930
Quand, comment et pourquoi l'esclavage a-t-il disparu dans le Sahel nigérien - si tant est qu'il ait complètement disparu ? Quels processus ont favorisé l'émancipation des personnes réduites en esclavage ? Quelles étaient les stratégies des administrateurs coloniaux, des propriétaires d'esclaves, des trafiquants, des esclaves eux-mêmes et de leurs descendants ? Au cours des deux premières décennies de l'occupation française du Sahel central, l'ab…
Camille LEFEBVRE. Frontières de sable, frontières de papier: Histoire de territoires et de frontières, du jihad de Sokoto à la colonisation française du Niger, XIX e -XX e siècles . Paris, Publication…
site ou, le cas chant, des conditions gnrales de la licence souscrite par votre tablissement
Migration History and Historiography
Migration has been a central factor in African history. It is likely that the human species started spreading on the planet within and outside of Africa between 2 and 2.5 million years ago. Although the earliest stages of human migrations are the subject of intense debate, most hypotheses concentrate on movements that occurred in the African continent. In historical times, African migrations can be divided into two broad sub-fields looking at, re…
Landscapes, Sources and Intellectual Projects of the West African Past: Essays in Honour of Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias
Landscapes, Sources and Intellectual Projects of the West African Past offers a comprehensive assessment of new directions in the historiography of West Africa. With twenty-four chapters by leading researchers in the study of West African history and cultures, the volume examines the main trends in multiple fields including the critical interpretation of Arabic sources; new archaeological surveys of trans-Saharan trade; the discovery of sources i…
From Slavery? Rethinking Slave Descent as an Analytical Category: The Case of the Mauritanian and Moroccan Ḥarāṭīn
Que signifie, après l’abolition mondiale de l’esclavage, le fait de définir des groupes ou des individus comme des « descendants d’esclaves » ? Lorsque l’esclavage était légal, les lois et les normes faisaient la distinction entre le statut juridique d’esclave et de celui d’homme ou de femme libre, et définissaient les relations de production, de reproduction et de propriété entre les personnes asservies et leurs propriétaires. Aujourd’hui, la te…
Political science (28 works) · History (18 works) · Law (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · African history and culture studies (15 works) · Law (15 works) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade (14 works) · Politics (14 works) · History (13 works) · African Studies and Geopolitics (11 works)