Teaching Documents by Samuël Coghe
The History Department at Ghent University is recruiting 3 doctoral fellows for the ERC Starting ... more The History Department at Ghent University is recruiting 3 doctoral fellows for the ERC Starting Grant Project ‘CATTLEFRONTIERS – (Post)Colonial Cattle Frontiers: Capitalism, Science and Empire in Southern and Central Africa, 1890s-1970s’ (2023-2028), under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Samuël Coghe.
DEADLINE for applications = 18.12.2023
From the colonial era until the HIV and Ebola epidemics of today, Africa has often been perceived... more From the colonial era until the HIV and Ebola epidemics of today, Africa has often been perceived as a ‘diseased continent’ – as a continent whose population and development has suffered greatly from a particularly heavy disease burden. In this course, which aims to introduce students to the social and cultural history of medicine in Africa from a global perspective, we will trace the origins and the impact of this perception. We will explore how both Africans and foreign actors in Africa dealt with disease and ill-health from precolonial times into the postcolonial era. We will look at African health concepts and healing systems and analyse how Africans dealt with western biomedical concepts and practices introduced and often violently imposed by colonial and missionary doctors, experts in tropical medicine and international organizations such as the WHO. These interactions were shaped by manifold forms of resistance and led to different forms of accomodation, hybridization and medical pluralism. We will also analyse the global dimensions of health and healing in Africa, by exploring not only how biomedical knowledge and practices circulated between empires and continents, but also how African healing ‘traditions’ and drugs travelled across oceans.
This seminar explores the impact of colonialism on agriculture and food production in Africa. Sta... more This seminar explores the impact of colonialism on agriculture and food production in Africa. Starting with the introduction of new staple foods such as manioc and maize from the Americas in the 16th century, it focuses on the colonial era between the 1870s and 1970s. We will analyse how, oscillating between the imperatives of cash crop production and food security, colonial rule tried to change the modes of agricultural production (labour forms, land ownership, gender roles, etc.), thus engendering new divisions and conflicts. We will pay particular attention to the role of (agricultural, veterinary, nutritional, soil, etc.) science in these transformation efforts and their effects on the environment. We will foreground African agency and the uneven results of these transformation processes. While, in some areas, colonial rule led to the production and export of global agricultural commodities, in others, local practices and consumption patterns persisted virtually unaltered throughout most of the colonial era.
Conference Call for Papers by Samuël Coghe
This year's annual Commodities of Empire international workshop will take place from 14 to 15 Jul... more This year's annual Commodities of Empire international workshop will take place from 14 to 15 July 2022 at the Freie Universität Berlin, in collaboration with the DFG funded project Commodifying Cattle. It investigates livestock commodities and commodification processes in global and imperial history. Deadline for the submission of paper proposals is 31st of January.
https://commoditiesofempire.org.uk/events/workshop-2022/
Books by Samuël Coghe
Este livro analisa as políticas de população coloniais em Angola entre 1890 e 1945 numa perspetiv... more Este livro analisa as políticas de população coloniais em Angola entre 1890 e 1945 numa perspetiva transimperial. Com base num conjunto vasto de fontes inéditas de múltiplos arquivos (de Angola e Portugal, mas também da França, Bélgica, Suíça, Alemanha e do Reino Unido), mostra como estas políticas foram concebidas, implementadas e contestadas. Analisa quer o modo e os motivos pelos quais médicos, administradores, missionários e outros atores coloniais tentaram compreender e quantificar as alterações demográficas, como a sua intervenção prática para «melhorar» as condições de saúde, os regimes reprodutivos e os padrões de migração da população «indígena» de Angola. O livro argumenta que estas intervenções estavam indissociavelmente ligadas a receios generalizados de despovoamento e subpovoamento, mas que a sua implementação foi muitas vezes dificultada por estruturas estatais fracas, conflitos internos na administração colonial e múltiplas formas de agência africana. Através de uma análise inédita e transimperial da história da demografia, saúde e migração na Angola colonial, o livro também desafia a ideia, ainda comum, do excecionalismo colonial português.
Population Politics in the Tropics explores colonial population policies in Angola between 1890 a... more Population Politics in the Tropics explores colonial population policies in Angola between 1890 and 1945 from a transimperial perspective. Using a wide array of previously unused sources and multilingual archival research from Angola, Portugal and beyond, Samuël Coghe sheds new light on the history of colonial Angola, showing how population policies were conceived, implemented and contested. He analyses why and how doctors, administrators, missionaries and other colonial actors tried to grasp and quantify demographic change and 'improve' the health conditions, reproductive regimes and migration patterns of Angola's 'native' population. Coghe argues that these interventions were inextricably linked to pervasive fears of depopulation and underpopulation, but that their implementation was often hampered by weak state structures, internal conflicts and multiple forms of African agency. Coghe's fresh analysis of demography, health and migration in colonial Angola challenges common ideas of Portuguese colonial exceptionalism.
Articles by Samuël Coghe
The Routledge Handbook of Pastoralism, 2026
the global demand, circulation, and impact of the commodities itself. On the other hand, economic... more the global demand, circulation, and impact of the commodities itself. On the other hand, economic and commodity historians have shown little enthusiasm for studying pastoralist economies or livestock commodities, instead attending to the extraction of minerals (such as gold, diamonds, or coal) and the production of cash crops (such as sugar, cotton, or cocoa), as well as their corresponding labor (migration) regimes, changing consumption patterns, and ecological consequences . However, partly due the animal turn in the humanities and social sciences, and alarming reports about the damaging effects of industrial livestock production, new historical scholarship is slowly emerging, particularly on cattle (
Environmental History, 2022
After the Second World War, colonial veterinary services, entrepreneurs, and African villagers in... more After the Second World War, colonial veterinary services, entrepreneurs, and African villagers in French Equatorial Africa (AEF) began to raise cattle in regions where this had been deemed impossible because of the threat of African animal trypanosomiasis. The opening of this new pastoral frontier in the humid savannas of Central Africa was not only a challenging logistical operation, involving the purchase, transport, and acclimatization of thousands of trypanotolerant animals. It also hinged on the mobilization of various forms of expertise, from veterinary medicine to soil science, important financial investments, and the participation of rural Africans. The article argues that the specific conditions in postwar AEF generated a frontier that was distinct from many other global and African cattle frontiers, as it was driven more by late-colonial development ideas and funds than capitalist expansion, even if these were sometimes entangled. Shaped by the interplay between local, (trans)imperial, and globally circulating knowledge, trypanotolerant cattle production in the AEF took the complementary forms of extensive ranching and small-scale peasant production. Although the introduction of trypanotolerant cattle triggered new conflicts, it was further pursued by postcolonial states, transforming rural economies and ecologies.
Commodity Frontiers 3, 2021
The word livestock itself suggests the reduction of animals as living things to animals as econom... more The word livestock itself suggests the reduction of animals as living things to animals as economic goods. Disaggregating the term into its component parts-live and stock-also suggest the difficulty of rendering things that are alive into things that are stocked, especially on large or predicable scales. The be alive is biological; living things breathe, eat, defecate, move, sleep, grow, reproduce, connect with others, get sick, die. To be stock, on the other hand, is economic; stocks are things held and exchanged. In capitalist relations specifically, livestock (and livestock parts) are owned, quantified, rationalized, commodified, specialized, simplified, contracted, accumulated, speculated upon, traded, sold.
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Teaching Documents by Samuël Coghe
DEADLINE for applications = 18.12.2023
Conference Call for Papers by Samuël Coghe
https://commoditiesofempire.org.uk/events/workshop-2022/
Books by Samuël Coghe
Articles by Samuël Coghe