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Guns, Race, Power in colonial South Africa - 1 views

HISTORY 2A History2A PM RADINGWANA 220165865

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  • Storey states that there was a general tendency, with the development of modern society and administration, for a state to become more determined to limit free access to firearms
  • In colonial societies this tendency had a racial bias. While colonial administration was ready to accept settler ownership of firearms, seeing it as a means of strengthening local military forces and colonial defences against external and internal threats, at the same time African ownership of firearms was increasingly seen as a potential threat to the stability of colonial communities. Even loyal African societies and chiefdoms were seen as a potential threat and therefore treated with distrust. This tendency was strengthened by the prolifeguns and caused much greater concerns
radingwanaphatane

The Import of Firearms into West Africa in the Eighteenth Century - 1 views

doi.org/...S0021853700017850

Phatane Radingwana 220165865 History 2A

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    The trebling of slave prices and the sharp reduction in gun prices between 1680 and 1720 enabled large militarised slave-exporting states to develop along the Gold and Slave Coasts. There was a strong demand for well-finished and well-proved guns as well as for the cheapest unproved guns, and the dangerous state of many of the guns imported into west Africa has been exaggerated.
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Guns, Race, and Skill in Nineteenth-Century Southern Africa - 2 views

www.jstor.org/40060682

History2A PM Radingwana 220165865

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  • radingwanaphatane on 25 Apr 23
     
    In colonial southern Africa there were plenty of guns and plenty of skilled shooters. South Africa's "gun society" originated in the seventeenth century, when the Dutch East India Company encouraged the European settlers of the Cape of Good Hope to procure firearms and to serve in militia.
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9780521885096_excerpt_001.pdf - 2 views

History 2A History2A PM RADINGWANA 220165865

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  • increasing lethality of guns persuaded South Africans to reconsider ideas about citizenship, institutions, and identities. People who owned guns came to support ideologies that they associated with technological changes. At the same time, ideologies were being reflected in the design of the guns themselves.
  • The first three chapters trace the spread of guns in South Africa during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Beginning in the middle of the seventeenth century, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) encouraged settlers to procure firearms and to serve in the militia. Until the end of the eighteenth century, gun ownership and militia service were encouraged and even required by the VOC, but the Boers who crossed the colonial boundaries into the African interior were forbidden from selling guns to Africans
  • Merchants and missionaries encouraged Africans to take up firearms as a way to gain security on a violent frontier. Guns were also a means for killing game animals. In 1812, after commenting on the extraordinary animals of the South African interior, the famous English traveler William J. Burchell wished that guns would spread more extensively to help people kill off the unwanted beasts. This in turn would result in the extension of modern, productive agriculture. 3 Animals died and agriculture spread.
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  • The spread of European settlement and government caused major disruptions to African societies, even as the British colonies at the Cape and Natal, together with the Boer republics, attempted to rein in disorder. Part of their efforts involved gun control. The republics prohibited Africans from gun ownership, while the Cape and Natal imposed various restrictions on ownership and trade, including licensing and fees.
radingwanaphatane

Firearms in Africa: an introduction.pdf - 1 views

History 2A History2A PM RADINGWANA 220165865

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  • In Africa this was very limited. Powder and shot were produced, and guns were repaired, but we have only found reference to the manufacture of complete weapons in relatively few and late instances. This contrasts markedly with the manufacture of guns in India, Afghanistan, China, and Japan. 1 In assessing this fact, technical skill is not the only factor of importance. It may be that arms were only manufactured where cheap imports were not available, and that manufacture, whether in West Africa or China or Afghanistan, was more an indication of embargo than of technical competence. 2
  • It is not certain if gun-flints were ever cut on a commercial basis in Africa; even in America there never seems to have been any regular gun-flint industry. Until 1800 France led the world in gun-flint trading, but by 1837 the flint-knappers of Brandon in England claimed a worldmonopoly. Black flints were best, but Brandon had different qualities. In 1865 their 'common African gun-flint' sold at is. o,d. or as. per thousand, while other varieties cost up to 5s. per thousand.
  • Dane guns' seem to have been originally bought by the Danes in Germany; in Birmingham they took orders for 'guns called sham Danish'. 7 Some Birmingham gunmakers stamped their guns 'London', while Belgians used Birmingham trade names, slightly misspelt. 8 In 1892 Belgian gunmakers told their government that Liege products would not sell in Africa 'unless they are marked with the English proof mark'. 9 This could be arranged quite legally; in 1890 Birmingham produced 176,000 Africa barrels of which 100,000 were duly proof-marked and then sold to be finished in Belgium with Belgian locks and stocks. 10 Finally, in the 1890s there was a small factory in Spain 'in which they made cheap imitation Winchester rifles', complete with patent numbers, mainly for the African market. 11 But however misleading the markings or vague the reports, it should still be possible to draw general and valid conclusions from contemporary mentions of firearms
radingwanaphatane

v36a13.pdf - 2 views

History 2A History2A PM RADINGWANA 220165865

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  • Firearms have a long and significant history in Africa. From their early introduction into the continent, largely as items of trade, firearms have been intricately bound in the various forms of European intrusion into Africa, from the slave trade to pacification and colonisation. Predictably, the history of firearms in Africa has attracted substantial scholarly attention over the past half a century. The result has been the development of a large body of literature on the topic and a proliferation of conflicting viewpoints and beliefs. The literature on the role and use of firearms in Africa has undergone significant changes over the last half-century and, given the dramatic transformations in political context within Africa over the same period, this is hardly surprising
  • while imports of firearms closely tracked imports of slaves, a guns-forslaves equation is too simple to describe the complexities of political transformations. Not only did guns play an ancillary rather than primary role in most African armies of this era, but for the most important states, guns [were merely an element in] a process of military transformation that was already underway. 1
  • In addition, Richards notes that the firearm trade peaked in the 1830s (although he gives no figures for this peak), which again weakens the ‘slave–gun cycle’ theory. 13 Firearms were being imported well before the heyday of the slave trade and their importation continued to rise in many key slaving areas after its abolition.
radingwanaphatane

Firearms in Nineteenth-Century Botswana: The Case of Livingstone's 8-Bore Bullet.pdf - 5 views

History 2A History2A PM RADINGWANA 220165865

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  • The acquisition of guns was both a cause and consequence of a surge in the
  • guns
  • E ve nb ef o reth ep o pu l arsh if tfr o mm uz zl el oa d i ngtobr ee chlo ad in ggu n s,t heim p ac toffi r ea rm s in southern Africa as elsewhere in the world was already being transformed by the presence of improvedriflesandshot
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • A few Europeans also experimented with elongated bullets from the late eighteenth century. 42 But major breakthroughs in their military development can be dated from the 1820s, being associated with the efforts of a circle of British and French innovators. While guns prior to the 1840s they were considered to be too difficult to load and maintain against barrel fouling for general battlefield use; Napoleon dismissing them ‘as the worst weapon that could be got into the hands of a soldier’.
  • From 1823 his efforts resulted in a series of revolutionary bullet designs that expanded upon firing. This quality allowed for both easier loading and enhanced grip to the rifling for better projection. The expansion concept was thereafter refined by the prominent Birmingham gunsmith William Greener, culminating in his 1836 pattern bullet and rifle system
  • xpansion concept was thereafter refined by the prominent Birmingham gunsmith William
radingwanaphatane

LONG TERM EFFECTS OF AFRICA'S SLAVE TRADE - 1 views

History 2A History2A PM RADINGWANA 220165865

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  • the slave trades may be an important factor explaining Africa’s high level of ethnic fractionalization today . This is significant for economic development given the established relationship between ethnic fractionalization and long-term economic growth (Easterly and Levine 1997). Because of the environment of uncertainty and insecurity at the time, individuals required weapons, such as iron knives, spears, swords or firearms, to defend themselves. These weapons could be obtained from Europeans in exchange for slaves, who were often obtained through local kidnappings
  • Historians have named this vicious cycle the “gun–slave cycle” (e.g., Lovejoy 2000) or the “iron–slave cycle” (e.g., Hawthorne 2003). The result of this vicious cycle was not only that communities raided other communities for slaves, but also that members of a community raided and kidnapped others within the community .
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Guns, Race, and Skill in Nineteenth-Century Southern Africa.pdf - 2 views

History 2A History2A PM RADINGWANA 220165865

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  • The Comaroffs' approach offers a good starting point from which to investigate what everyday practice meant, ideologically, with respect to firearms - carrying them, caring for them, storing them, not to mention hunting and fighting with them. It happens that skills with guns and the perceived and real links to political power weapons and skills conferred were debated extensively in southern Africa in the nineteenth century. Everyday practice as it related to firearms, as well as the representation of everyday practice, was highly ideological, as may be seen in the efforts of those who wished to regulate the spread o
  • se methodological challenges, this article seeks to explore two stories together. In one, southern Africans of the early nineteenth century adapted guns and skills to local circumstances, and mimeomorphic firearm skills that would appear to be universal turn out to be subject to local variation. As local adaptations occurred, guns improved, game disappeared, and skills declined. This is an empirical argument that contradicts cherished myths about colonial frontiersmen in southern Africa being natural marksmen, as well as less pleasant myths about the technological incompetence of Africans. Meanwhile, a related body of evidence emerges that is best examined through discourse analysis. This is the story of changing settler representations of firearms and shooting skills. Over the course of the nineteenth century, depictions of guns shifted emphasis. Early on, settlers described guns as ordinary frontier artifacts, but by the 1870s they depicted them as dangerous tools that, in skilled hands, could be used either to support or to undermine the emerging colonial or
  • Skill and Environment What skills were required to fire a gun in the nineteenth century? How were they changing? At the beginning of the century, most of the world's soldiers used muzzle-loading, smoothbore, flintlock muskets.9 When the musket was fired, the ball bounced down the sides of the barrel and out in the general direction in which it had been aimed; the smoothbore was an inaccurate weapon. Soldiers were drilled to load and fire in volleys, a social skill that compensated for the musket's technical shortco
radingwanaphatane

I.pdf - 2 views

History 2A History2A PM RADINGWANA 220165865

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  • gun numbers of flintlock firearms shipped to Africa in the late 17 th and early 18 th centuries, precisely when slave exports begin to increase. 14 gun the matchlock musket, had not proved to be very effective in tropical climates, and the Catholic Church prohibited their sale to non-Christians, although some were distributed to Kings as gifts and others were captured by Africans in skirmishes with Europeans. The sale of large numbers gun gun prohibitions. 1
  • gun
  • Using war-related variations in cargo shipments to Africa, I identify and estimate a variety of short-run slave export supply functions. I find that in the early stages of expansion in slave exports, the gun initiated a “raid or be raided” arms race in Africa
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • What about the gun-slave cycle? Historians have documented dramatic increases in the
  • Before then, the older gunpowder technology,
  • f guns and gunpowder to Africans began with Protestant slave traders not bound by Catholic
  • guns and gunpowder to Africans began with Protestant slave traders not bound by Catholic prohibitions. 15 The Dutch were the first to sell large numbers, followed by the English as their participation in the slave trade expanded.
  • There were so many kinds of guns that is would prove difficult to construct a reliable annual index. Also, firearms are durable goods, so in order to convert trade flows into the stocks available for slave production one would need estimates of depreciation rates, and ideally a different depreciation rate for each type of gun. And even if the stock of guns could be estimated, their effective capacity as weaponry is still largely determined by the amount of gunpowder available to activate them.
  • Gunpowder, on the other hand, is a more homogeneous product and much easier to handle quantitatively. While there are different grades of gunpowder, the differences are matters of degree, and a poor grade was always shipped to Africa to match the poor quality of the firearms shipped there [see Inikori (1977), West (1991) and Richards (1980)].
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Effects of the trade on African societies in East Africa - 3 views

www.bbc.co.uk

HISTORY 2A History2A PM RADINGWANA 220165865

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    The mass introduction of firearm was the single most significant technological innovation brought by Europeans to East Africa. Kings and Warlords were anxious to trade with Europeans to acquire guns.
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The Machine Gun: History, Development - 2 views

guide.loc.gov

History 2A History2A PM RADINGWANA 220165865

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    Not until the mid-1800s was a weapon invented that was practical, for the most part mechanically reliable, and could be reloaded relatively quickly. The best known example was the Gatling Gun. It was the invention of Richard J. Gatling (1818-1903). Other designs made their appearance as well but did not gain the notoriety the Gatling Gun achieved. These other designs included the Montigny Mitrailleuse, the Nordenfelt Gun, the Agar Gun or Union Repeating Gun (also known as the Coffee Mill Gun), and the Gardner Gun.
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