Suchergebnisse

Abstract: During the early nineteenth century, the Omani outpost of Zanzibar emerged as a leading marketplace in the Western Indian Ocean. The island's economic expansion depended heavily on a community of well-connected Indian merchants. The port's rising fortunes also attracted traders from farther afield. By 1826, American merchants had reached the island. Although Americans had decades of experience in the region, they struggled to turn a profit on Zanzibar. Over time, American traders realized that commercial success depended on a strong relationship with the island's Indian community. By the 1840s, the American consul, Richard Waters, and Zanzibar's custom master, Jairam Shivji, had formed a lucrative arrangement exchanging commodities. Waters, Shivji, and their peers developed a commercial framework that melded key precepts of Indian Ocean trade with their Atlantic equivalents. Aided by bilingual commodity contracts, trade between the United States and Zanzibar flourished. In time, the island served as a crucial springboard for American ventures to India. With the help of Parsi firms, Waters and his successors incorporated Bombay into their trade routes. In turn, the city's economic expansion reshaped trade in East Africa. By the American Civil War, commercial intelligence and British credit from Bombay contributed to Americans' success on Zanzibar.

Black electoral leaders in the post-civil rights South have exhibited broad agreement on the nature of the political task of displacing unresponsive white elites from power and directing attention to the previously excluded black constituency. There are a few cases, however, in which the commonly expected solidarity and consensus among the black elected leaders has not occurred, despite intensified hostility from the white elite. In this analysis these circumstances are explored from one small town in Mississippi where blacks won nearly total administrative control in 1977. However, the apparent leadership consensus, though fragile, quickly evaporated, due to conflicts of ideology, class, idiosyncrasy, and racial invidiousness. This ultimately led to administrative paralysis in the allocation and management of scarce political goods. In this town where there were broad disagreements between three sets of political contenders, each sought to dominate the policy process by staffing various public positions. The scarcity of these positions, the diametrically opposed goals of the contenders, and the precariousness of the control exerted even by the administrative leadership produced a hopeless struggle. Eventually the government crumbled. Analysis reveals that the complex sociopolitical environment and certain aspects of the political structure contributed to this breakdown. The rapid development of a tripartite leadership cleavage was hardly accommodated by political structures designed to serve the ends of a racial caste system. The fragility of the political environment and the absence of structural mechanisms for conflict resolution severely diminished the ability of the new leaders to perform.