This night, hosted by the College Faculty of London (UCL) Institute of the Americas, Shantel George (College of Glasgow) will current “The Kola Nut within the Atlantic World: Colonial Violence, Consumption Cultures and Diasporic Mobilities. This free occasion takes place on-line in the present day—March 1, 2023, from 6:00 to 7:30 pm (GMT). E book right here.
Description: From the late nineteenth-century, British explorers, bioprospectors and homoeopathic chemists fervently reported the ‘discovery’ of the African kola nut, which was slated to supersede chocolate, tea and low, bolster imperial ambitions, and provide ‘miraculous’ well being advantages. For African and African-descended peoples, nevertheless, the kola nut was not new, having cultivated, consumed, and, from at the very least the thirteenth century, established buying and selling networks within the nut.
But, few research study Africans as distributors and shoppers of world commodities, failing to recognise the influence of Africans all through the life histories of commodities. This speak will chart the advanced historical past and wide-ranging affect of the African kola nut, specializing in Nigeria, Jamaica and Britain from 1500 to 1900. It makes use of this investigation as a case research to stress and clarify the long-neglected position of Africans as distributors and shoppers of world commodities and to spotlight the connection between consumption cultures and imperialism in late-nineteenth-century Britain.
Shantel George is a lecturer in historical past, researching the transatlantic slave commerce, slavery and emancipation, with a selected give attention to the British Caribbean. She acquired her PhD from SOAS, College of London, and is at the moment ending a e book manuscript, “Yoruba are on a Rock”: Liberated Africans and African Work in Grenada (beneath contract with Cambridge College Press). Shantel can also be engaged on a world historical past of the African kola nut, which is supported by short-term fellowships from the Gilder Lehrman Middle for the Examine of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition and the John Carter Brown Library.
For extra info, see https://www.ucl.ac.uk/americas/occasions/2023/mar/kola-nut-atlantic-world-colonial-violence-consumption-cultures-and-diasporic
[Image above from WIKIMEDIA COMMONS: “A botanical drawing of the kola nut tree with a view of how it rests in the pod on the bottom right.”]