New publications

Rahmane Idrissa wrote an article about the death of Chad’s late president Idriss Déby from a historical perspective for Sidecar, the blog of New Left Review. 'What did France gain in tirelessly propping up a dictator against the aspirations of his people? Such interests are at first sight hard to perceive. They are certainly not economic.'

Duncan Money and Limin Teh wrote an annotated bibliography for JSTOR Daily about race and the organisation of labour from a global perspective. It charts the global history of race and labour in the early twentieth century, highlighting the complex ways in which race, labour, and imperialism intersect. The article is available open access.

The ASCL Library recently acquired three books that constitute interesting sources for the colonial history of the Equatorial region. All three involve writings by Alfons Vermeulen, an employee of the ‘Nieuwe Afrikaansche Handels-Vennootschap’ (NAHV), the Dutch trading house active in the wider Congo region in the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. Vermeulen's memoirs have now been published, edited and annotated by a member of his family, Fred van den Hoek. ASCL researcher Klaas van Walraven wrote a paper about these acquisitions.