"Exploring the multifaceted history of dispossession, consumption, and inequality in West Central Africa, Mariana P. Candido presents a bold revisionist history of Angola from the sixteenth century until the Berlin Conference of 1884–5. Synthesising disparate strands of scholarship, including the histories of slavery, land tenure, and gender in West Central Africa, Candido makes a significant contribution to ongoing historical debates. She demonstrates how ideas about dominion and land rights eventually came to inform the appropriation and enslavement of free people and their labour. By centring the experiences of West Central Africans, and especially African women, this book challenges dominant historical narratives, and shows that securing property was a gendered process. Drawing attention to how archives obscure African forms of knowledge and normalize conquest, Candido interrogates simplistic interpretations of ownership and pushes for the decolonization of African history."
From Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola: A History of Dispossession, Slavery, and Inequality. Cambridge UP, 2022.
Mariana P. Candido (Emory University/Nina Maria Gorrissen Fellow in History at the American Academy at Berlin (Fall 2023)) is a specialist in West Central African history during the era of the transatlantic slave trade. She obtained her Ph.D. in African History in Canada at York University. Mariana’s work combines social and economic history, focusing on slavery, migration, colonialism, collective versus individual property rights, and gender. She has published three books (most recently: Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola. A History of Dispossession, Slavery, and Inequality (CUP, 2022)), as well as three edited volumes. Mariana also published in a wide variety of journals, such as Slavery and Abolition, History in Africa, Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, Afro-Ásia, as well as African Economic History, for which she also serves as one of the editors.
The workshop is open to all members of the BCDSS, including Ph.D. candidates and M.A. students.
This workshop series is organised by the Research Group "The Concept of Slavery in African History” and the Working Group “Rethinking Atlantic Narratives of Slavery and Freedom”.
Mary Afolabi
Boluwatife Akinro
Ricardo Márquez García
Jutta Wimmler
Lukas Wissel