The Sahara has long been portrayed as a barrier that divides the Mediterranean world from Africa proper and isolates the countries of the Maghrib from their southern and eastern neighbors. Rather ...than viewing the desert as an isolating barrier, this volume takes up historian Fernand Braudel's description of the Sahara as "the second face of the Mediterranean." The essays recast the history of the region with the Sahara at its center, uncovering a story of densely interdependent networks that span the desert's vast expanse. They explore the relationship between the desert's "islands" and "shores" and the connections and commonalities that unite the region. Contributors draw on extensive ethnographic and historical research to address topics such as trade and migration; local notions of place, territoriality, and movement; Saharan cities; and the links among ecological, regional, and world-historical approaches to understanding the Sahara.
Sovereignty in Exileexplores sovereignty and state power through the case of a liberation movement that set out to make itself into a state. The Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) was founded by ...the Polisario Front in the wake of Spain's abandonment of its former colony, the disputed Western Sahara. Morocco laid claim to the same territory, and the conflict has locked Polisario and Morocco in a political stalemate that has lasted forty years. Complicating the situation is the fact that Polisario conducts its day-to-day operations in refugee camps near Tindouf, in Algeria, which house most of the Sahrawi exile community. SADR (a partially recognized state) and Polisario (Western Sahara's liberation movement) together form an unusual governing authority, originally premised on the dismantling of a perceived threat to national (Sahrawi) unity: tribes.
Drawing on unprecedented long-term research gained by living with Sahrawi refugee families, Alice Wilson examines how tribal social relations are undermined, recycled, and have reemerged as the refugee community negotiates governance, resolves disputes, manages social inequalities, and improvises alternatives to taxation. Wilson trains an ethnographic lens on the creation of administrative categories, legal reforms, aid distribution, marriage practices, local markets, and contested elections within the camps. Tracing social, political, and economic changes among Sahrawi refugees,Sovereignty in Exilereveals the dynamics of a postcolonial liberation movement that has endured for decades in the deserts of North Africa while trying to bring about the revolutionary transformation of a society which identifies with a Bedouin past.
This book analyses recent developments concerning the application of the international legal doctrines of recognition and self-determination in relation to the Western Sahara Question. It ...investigates the emergent shift in favour of Morocco’s sovereignty claim to Western Sahara as apparent from the positions adopted by an increasing number of third States in the United Nations and the recent spate of third States establishing consulates in Western Sahara, with Morocco’s encouragement. It reflects on what the functioning of the doctrines of recognition and self-determination in this situation reveals about contemporary international law in practice more generally. The work will be of interest to scholars, researchers, and postgraduate students as well as practitioners of public international law who have a particular interest in decolonisation, self-determination disputes, and/or conflicts about natural resource entitlements. It will also appeal to readers with an interest in the work of International Organisations, including the United Nations, the European Union, and the African Union, and to specialists in international relations and regional politics.
During the heyday of camel caravan traffic--from the eighth century CE arrival of Islam in North Africa to the early twentieth-century building of European colonial railroads that linked the Sudan ...with the Atlantic--the Sahara was one of the world's great commercial highways, bringing gold, slaves, and other commodities northward and sending both manufactured goods and Mediterranean culture southward into the Sudan. Historian Ralph A. Austen here tells the remarkable story of an African world that grew out of more than one thousand years of trans-Saharan trading.
This study is the first of its kind to examine the history and organization of trans-Saharan trade in western Africa using original source material. It documents the internal dynamics of a trade ...network system based on a case study of 'Berber' traders from the Wād Nūn region, who specialized in outfitting camel caravans in the nineteenth century. Through an examination of contracts, correspondence, fatwas and interviews with retired caravaners, Professor Lydon shows how traders used their literacy skills in Arabic and how they had recourse to experts of Islamic law to regulate their long-distance transactions. The book also examines the strategies devised by women to participate in caravan trade. By embracing a continental approach, this study bridges the divide between West African and North African studies. The work will be of interest to historians of Africa, the Middle East, and the world and to scholars of long-distance trade, Muslim societies and Islamic law.
The Western Sahara conflict has proven to be one of the most protracted and intractable struggles facing the international community. Pitting local nationalist determination against Moroccan ...territorial ambitions, the dispute is further complicated by regional tensions with Algeria and the geo-strategic concerns of major global players, including the United States, France, and the territory's former colonial ruler, Spain. For over twenty years, the UN Security Council has failed to find a formula that will delicately balance these interests against Western Sahara's long-denied right to a self-determination referendum as one of the last UN-recognized colonies. In the first book-length treatment of the issue in over two decades, Zunes and Mundy examine the origins, evolution, and resilience of the Western Sahara conflict, deploying a diverse array of sources and firsthand knowledge of the region gained from multiple research visits. Shifting geographical frames - local, regional, and international - provide for a robust analysis of the stakes involved.
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Whether by falling prey to Algerian corsairs or crashing onto the desert shores of Western Sahara, a handful of Americans in the first years of the Republic found themselves enslaved in a ...system that differed so markedly from nineteenth century U.S. slavery that some contemporaries and modern scholars hesitate to categorize their experiences as 'slavery.' Sears uses a comparative approach, placing African enslavement of Americans and Europeans in the context of Mediterranean and Ottoman slaveries, while individually investigating the system of slavery in Algiers and Western Sahara. This work illuminates the commonalities and peculiarities of these slaveries, while contributing to a growing body of literature that showcases the flexibility of slavery as an institution.
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Remembering the 'Horror of Mahometan Vassalage:' 'This World if full of Vicissitudes' PART I: ALGIERS
'Far Distant From our Country, Families Friends and Connections': American Slaves in Ottoman Algiers 'Once a Citizen of the United States of America, but at Present the Most Miserable Slave': Americans and Slave Community 'American Livestock, Now Slaves in Algiers': Elite Slaves in Ottoman Algiers 'We Set No Great Value Upon Money': A Slave Economy PART II: WESTERN SAHARA
'Sons of Sorrow': American Slaves in the Western Sahara 'Clear the Country of All You Christian Dogs': The Business of Redemption A Different Kind of Slavery
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Christine E. Sears is an assistant professor of History at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, where she teaches classes in the Atlantic World, Early American Republic, and comparative slavery.
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This study illuminates the commonalities and the peculiarities of different slaveries and contributes to a growing body of literature that showcases the flexibility of slavery as an institution.
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1) POWERFUL CONTRIBUTION TO ENSLAVEMENT STUDIES: While others have delineated the different strands of slavery in the Ottoman and Mediterranean worlds, Sears offers a particularly convincing and concrete examination by contrasting these with the American system of slavery.
2) HOT TOPIC: Enslavement studies is a rapidly growing field, with an exciting new transnational dimension that this study exemplifies.
3) UNUSUALLY BROAD PERSPECTIVE: Sears is actually an American historian, but her study reveals an impressive and credible engagement with all of the relevant literature in Middle Eastern and North African social/cultural studies.
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"Sears presents a highly readable history of the 140 American captives of corsairs in Algiers or from shipwrecks. Recommended." - CHOICE
Western Sahara Zunes, Stephen; Mundy, Jacob; McGovern, George
2010, 2010-08-04, 20100101
eBook
The Western Sahara conflict has proven to be one of the most protracted and intractable struggles facing the international community. Pitting local nationalist determination against Moroccan ...territorial ambitions, the dispute is further complicated by regional tensions with Algeria and the geo-strategic concerns of major global players, including the United States, France, and the territory’s former colonial ruler, Spain. For over twenty years, the UN Security Council has failed to find a formula that will delicately balance these interests against Western Sahara’s long-denied right to a self-determination referendum as one of the last UN-recognized colonies.
In the first book-length treatment of the issue in over two decades, Zunes and Mundy examine the origins, evolution, and resilience of the Western Sahara conflict, deploying a diverse array of sources and firsthand knowledge of the region gained from multiple research visits. Shifting geographical frames—local, regional, and international—provide for a robust analysis of the stakes involved.
Sorcery or Science? examines how two Sufi Muslim
theologians who rose to prominence in the western Sahara Desert in
the late eighteenth century, Sīdi al-Mukhtār al-Kuntī (d. 1811) and
his son and ...successor, Sīdi Muḥammad al-Kuntī (d. 1826), decisively
influenced the development of Sufi Muslim thought in West
Africa.
Known as the Kunta scholars, Mukhtār al-Kuntī and Muḥammad
al-Kuntī were influential teachers who developed a pedagogical
network of students across the Sahara. In exploring their
understanding of "the realm of the unseen"-a vast, invisible world
that is both surrounded and interpenetrated by the visible
world-Ariela Marcus-Sells reveals how these theologians developed a
set of practices that depended on knowledge of this unseen world
and that allowed practitioners to manipulate the visible and
invisible realms. They called these practices "the sciences of the
unseen." While they acknowledged that some Muslims-particularly
self-identified "white" Muslim elites-might consider these
practices to be "sorcery," the Kunta scholars argued that these
were legitimate Islamic practices. Marcus-Sells situates their
ideas and beliefs within the historical and cultural context of the
Sahara Desert, surveying the cosmology and metaphysics of the realm
of the unseen and the history of magical discourses within the
Hellenistic and Arabo-Islamic worlds.
Erudite and innovative, this volume connects the Islamic
sciences of the unseen with the reception of Hellenistic discourses
of magic and proposes a new methodology for reading written
devotional aids in historical context. It will be welcomed by
scholars of magic and specialists in Africana religious studies,
Islamic occultism, and Islamic manuscript culture.
