africa business

Softcover. University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2nd pr., 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 266 pages, b&w illustrations. INSCRIBED BY KELLEY on the title page. Lydia Hamilton Smith (1813-1884) was a prominent African American businesswoman in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and the longtime housekeeper, life companion, and collaborator of the state's abolitionist congressman Thaddeus Stevens. In his biography of this remarkable woman, Mark Kelley reveals how Smith served the cause of abolition, managed Stevens's household, acquired property, and crossed racialized social boundaries. In the last years of Stevens's life, as his declining health threatened to short-circuit his work, Smith risked her own well-being to keep him alive while he led the drive to end slavery, impeach Andrew Johnson, and push for the ratification of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Clean copy.

Hardcover. UK, Cambridge University Press, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 407 pages. Color and b&w illustrations. Details the history of cotton and how it has impacted the textile and garment trade. Today's world textile and garment trade is valued at a staggering $425 billion. We are told that under the pressure of increasing globalisation, it is India and China that are the new world manufacturing powerhouses. However, this is not a new phenomenon: until the industrial revolution, Asia manufactured great quantities of colorful printed cottons that were sold to places as far afield as Japan, West Africa and Europe. Cotton explores this earlier globalized economy and its transformation after 1750 as cotton led the way in the industrialization of Europe. By the early nineteenth century, India, China and the Ottoman Empire switched from world producers to buyers of European cotton textiles, a position that they retained for over two hundred years. This is a fascinating and insightful story which ranges from Asian and European technologies and African slavery to cotton plantations in the Americas and consumer desires across the globe. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Fourth Estate, 2nd pr., 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 287 pages. A very clean, tight copy. Here is the true story of the strike that upset the diamond kings, and with it, a history of the world's most acclaimed diamonds, the process by which they are cut, smuggled and stolen, legends and superstitions, and of the shadowy hand of De Beers, for whom diamonds are forever.

Hardcover. New York, Umbrage Editions, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 240 pages. Illustrated throughout in b&w. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to covers. Having worked as a photojournalist in the 1990s in Zaire, Sierra Leone and Angola, van Lohuizen had seen the effects of the diamond trade first hand, and in 2005, he went back to Africa to assess the situation under new peace agreements. His haunting black and white images follow diamonds from the mines in Africa to retail spaces in New York and parties in London.

Hardcover. New York, Umbrage Editions, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 240 pages. Illustrated throughout in b&w. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to covers. Having worked as a photojournalist in the 1990s in Zaire, Sierra Leone and Angola, van Lohuizen had seen the effects of the diamond trade first hand, and in 2005, he went back to Africa to assess the situation under new peace agreements. His haunting black and white images follow diamonds from the mines in Africa to retail spaces in New York and parties in London.

Hardcover. New York, Umbrage Editions, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 240 pages. Illustrated throughout in b&w. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to covers. Having worked as a photojournalist in the 1990s in Zaire, Sierra Leone and Angola, van Lohuizen had seen the effects of the diamond trade first hand, and in 2005, he went back to Africa to assess the situation under new peace agreements. His haunting black and white images follow diamonds from the mines in Africa to retail spaces in New York and parties in London.

Hardcover. St. Paul MN, Minnesota Historical Society, 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards. 143 pages, b&w photos throughout. After serving in World War II, John Glanton returned home to Minnesota and began taking his camera around the streets, parks, clubs, restaurants, and private homes of Minneapolis, capturing the sights and scenes of everyday life for African Americans in the city. The images--from intimate portraits to public gatherings--reveal a dynamic and diverse community at a time when the nation was entering the postwar boom but before the civil rights movement had taken root. Glanton's photos offer a rare look into the lives and lifestyles of families and individuals often left out of histories of Minnesota's past, showing people at work and play, young and old, happy and sad. The images highlight black-owned businesses of the day, the music and club scene, and weddings and other family occasions to depict the experiences of African American people as presented through the lens of an African American photographer. Long forgotten in the garage of a family member, the photo negatives were recently rediscovered and digitized. A selection of 200 of the more than 800 images are featured here, along with commentary that further illuminates the lives and experiences of African Americans in postwar Minnesota.

Hardcover. Jefferson NC, McFarland, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 223 pages, b&w photos. Eugene Jackson became a child star in 1924 playing "Pineapple" in the original "Our Gang" comedy shorts. Join him as he shares his life story -- a story that preserves the history of vaudeville and early Hollywood as well as chronicles the African American experience in the entertainment business.

Softcover. London, ABACUS/Little Brown, reprint, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 434 pages. Having travelled across West Africa for over ten years, Peter Biddlecombe's often hilarious account of a long and lingering liaison dangereuse with the sixty per cent of the continent that is French-speaking is a highly readable, hugely entertaining introduction to the je ne sais quoi of French Africa. In countries such as Togo, Mali and Burkina Faso, Biddlecome encounters old-fashioned camel butchers, modern witch doctors who run mail-order companies, gold smugglers and counterfeiters who send their sons to Oxford. He also experiences a delicious foie gras of places: from eerie voodoo ceremonies in the old slave port of Ouidah to Italian ice-cream parlors in the middle of the Sahara desert. And Biddlecombe reveals not only Francophone Africa's politics, often bizarre business traditions and culture, but also provides a mass of practical advice on everything from how to eat a water-rat to talking your way through a road block in the middle of an attempted coup. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 168 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy still in shrink wrap. Color and black & white images throughout. Tight copy. Helena Rubinstein: Beauty Is Power traces the path of this remarkable early feminist and visionary art patron. In Rubinstein's world, art and commerce blended seamlessly. She ornamented her salons and homes with splendid artworks--Surrealist murals, modernist portraits, Art Deco furniture, Venetian mirrors, and one of the era's great collections of African and Oceanic art. Her understanding of beauty was similarly expansive and democratic: she saw the face as the site for self-expression and the exploration of identity. The Rubinstein beauty program thus included not only makeup and hairdressing, but also lessons in health, deportment, and culture. Such features, innovative at the time and wildly popular, today provide a fascinating glimpse into popular culture as it affected women in the 20th century.

Softcover. NY, The New Press, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 403 pages. Edited by Ira Berlin, the Bancroft Prize-winning author of Many Thousands Gone, and Leslie Harris, Slavery in New York brings together twelve new contributions by leading historians of slavery and African American life in New York. Published to accompany a major exhibit at the New York Historical Society, the book demonstrates how slavery shaped the day-to-day experience of New Yorkers, black and white, and how, as a way of doing business, it propelled New York to become the commercial and financial power it is today. Powerfully illustrated with images from the New York Historical Society exhibit, Slavery and the Making of New York will be the definitive account of New York's slave past.

Hardcover. Boston, Little Brown, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 162 pages, b&w photos. Biography of the producer who made four great movies: On the Waterfront; African Queen; Bridge on the River Kwai; and Lawrence of Arabia and lots of mediocrities. Most successful when he assembled talent and let them work, he became controlling and destructive. Very good in a bright dust jacket.

Hardcover. Stanford CA, Hoover Institution Press, 1st, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 280 pages, b&w illustrations, endpapers map. A study of the development of the trade union movement in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) after the Second World War, which places them in the context of wider social and industrial change in the country. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 426 pages, illustrations. From Pulitzer Prize-winner David Zucchino comes a searing account of the Wilmington riot and coup of 1898, an extraordinary event unknown to most Americans. By the 1890s, Wilmington was North Carolina's largest city and a shining example of a mixed-race community. It was a bustling port city with a burgeoning African American middle class and a Fusionist government of Republicans and Populists that included black aldermen, police officers and magistrates. There were successful black-owned businesses and an African American newspaper, The Record. But across the state-and the South--white supremacist Democrats were working to reverse the advances made by former slaves and their progeny. In 1898, in response to a speech calling for white men to rise to the defense of Southern womanhood against the supposed threat of black predators, Alexander Manly, the outspoken young Record editor, wrote that some relationships between black men and white women were consensual. His editorial ignited outrage across the South, with calls to lynch Manly. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Robert Hale, 1st, 1958, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 342 pages, ribbon bookmark present. Map crisp and undamaged in front pocket. To which is added a Union-Castle East African Atlas with 12 pages of color maps followed by dozens of local business ads. Dust jacket spine with loss to top and bottom. Otherwise a clean, bright copy.