Can name analysis be used to study elite persistence in African contexts? Taking Sierra Leone as a case study, we use surnames to measure how two historical elites (descendants of settlers that comprise Sierra Leone's Krio community and members of Chiefly Ruling Houses) have fared over the...

Postkoloniales Counter-Mapping ist eine Methode, die sich seit einigen Jahren zunehmender Beliebtheit erfreut. Im Allgemeinen dient sie dazu, koloniale Spuren und Machtstrukturen in urbanen Räumen sichtbar zu machen und somit zur Dekolonisierung beizutragen. Bei dieser Form des Kartierens...

This essay, part of a forum on Claire Priest’s Credit Nation: Property Laws and Institutions in Early America, points toward a different framing for the history of property and credit in early America, one compatible with many of Priest’s finding but that trades off the theoretical elegance...

Conventional wisdom proposes deep historical roots for authoritarianism in Africa: either colonial “decentralized despotism” or enduring structural features. We present a new theoretical perspective. Africans sought autonomous local communities, which constrained precolonial rulers....

1. South-South Migration, Inequality and Development: An Introduction -- PART I Conceptualising South-South Migration -- 2. The Enduring Impacts of Slavery: An Historical Perspective on South-South Migration -- 3. Recentering the South in Studies of Migration. 4. Writing the Camp -- 5. Migration...