This dissertation traces the intellectual and social history of slavery in the Lower Congo over the Longue Durée. It examines how Bantu-speaking groups of the Lower Congo inherited, constructed, reconstructed, and passed on to younger generations a vocabulary that framed their shifting slaving practices from their arrival in the region...
This dissertation examines the longue durée political history of Ateker-speaking agro-pastoralists in the semi-arid plains of today’s Uganda – Kenya – Ethiopia – South Sudan borderlands. Today’s Ateker-speaking communities include the Karimojong, Teso, Turkana, Toposa, Dodos, Jie, Nyangatom, and Jiye. Over the past millennium, Ateker-speaking communities developed a diversity of...
Historians have long argued that humanitarianism—what Thomas Haskell once described as “alleviating the suffering of distant strangers”—first emerged in eighteenth-century Europe as part of a complex set of perceptual changes involving capitalist growth, Enlightenment ideas, and Christian values. Given these claims, it is no coincidence that humanitarianism has often been...