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Reassessing the Significance of Firearms in Central Africa: The Case of North-Western Zambia to the 1920s

Macola, Giacomo (2010) Reassessing the Significance of Firearms in Central Africa: The Case of North-Western Zambia to the 1920s. Journal of African History, 51 (3). pp. 301-321. ISSN 0021-8537. (doi:10.1017/S0021853710000538) (KAR id:44367)

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Official URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0021853710000538

Abstract

Based on a close examination of European travelogues and the evidence produced in the wake of the formulation of colonial gun policies, this article contends that the significance of firearms in Central Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been unduly played down in the existing literature. The first substantive section of the article charts the movement of the gun frontier in nineteenth-century north-western Zambia. It foregrounds the new technology’s economic and military applications, the means through which north-western Zambians overcame some at least of its limitations, and the plurality of innovative social roles that they attributed to it. Successive sections centre on the pervasiveness of gun-running in the early twentieth century and the implementation and profound social consequences of gun control laws.

Item Type: Article
DOI/Identification number: 10.1017/S0021853710000538
Uncontrolled keywords: Angola, Central Africa, Zambia, firearms, gun laws, history of technology, hunting, smuggling, trade, warfare
Subjects: D History General and Old World > DT Africa
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Arts and Humanities > School of History
Depositing User: Giacomo Macola
Date Deposited: 13 Nov 2014 10:24 UTC
Last Modified: 16 Nov 2021 10:17 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/44367 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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