Tracing the Itineraries of Working Concepts across African History

Abstract

This essay takes as its starting point a question: do historians of Africa’s early and more recent pasts need each other’s labor histories when studying the relationship between work and mobility?1 A response in the negative foregrounds the differences between the economic and political worlds of Africans living before the fifteenth century and the economic and political worlds of merchant capitalism, industrial capitalism, colonialism, independence, and neoliberalism.2 This answer suggests that as people moved for the purpose of work from the early modern period, the ties forged (and severed) between people and with objects were dramatically changed from the strategies of earlier communities. We may well ask whether “labor” is even an applicable concept for periods before interactions between Africans and Europeans. It is easy to agree that there are great differences in the histories of movement and work across the chronological divides that structure African historiography. But we might also imagine these divides as thresholds through which we peer, gaining a rich but necessarily partial view of each other’s knowledge about the common problems and questions that animate our scholarship in different ways. When we survey each other’s fields to (at the very least) keep abreast of trends that impact our teaching, we