Frontiers in Social Science features new research in the flagship journals of the Social Science Research Council’s founding disciplinary associations. Every month we publish a new selection of articles from the most recent issues of these journals, marking the rapid advance of the frontiers of social and behavioral science.
Women working as foreign traders in Dakar use their status as strangers to their economic advantage.
Mande women in West Africa unable or unwilling to conform to patriarchal gender expectations risk being evicted from social and kinship support structures. Some nonconformist women from Mali respond to this predicament by engaging in tactical strangerhood: they choose to remain on the social margins, capitalizing on their situation as strangers by working as foreign traders in Dakar (Senegal). Tactical strangerhood entails only partial inclusion into patriarchal family and social structures and constitutes one of the nonconformist ways in which women in West Africa enact gender roles. Long-distance trade and travel by Mande women have led to new forms of gendered strangerhood, challenging—and potentially transforming—dominant ideologies of gender differentiation in this part of West Africa. By engaging in tactical strangerhood, women develop new forms of gendered subjectivity. Tactical strangerhood can therefore be considered an implicitly feminist and emancipatory exercise.
A new analysis counters the King Cotton narrative and reveals that hay was just as valuable as cotton and wheat in the nineteenth-century US.
Hay was a linchpin of the early industrial energy regime. It was the primary fodder for working horses, who became more rather than less important over the 1800s. Though largely ignored by historians, hay was of comparable value to cotton and wheat in the nineteenth-century United States. The crop’s historiographical invisibility is partly due to its relatively informal and decidedly subglobal production and exchange patterns. Whereas cotton and wheat exports passed through customhouses and institutionalized exchanges that carefully recorded trade volumes, hay was almost never exported and often underwent no market transaction at all, instead being used as an intermediate good on farms. Only when the US federal government added a detailed agricultural census in 1850 did the magnitude and importance of hay production become publicly legible. At that point, hay was drafted into a wide-ranging debate about economic development between Northern antislavery nationalists and Southern proslavery free traders, with “King Hay” emerging as a foil for “King Cotton.” King Hay thus urges historians to pay more attention to the trade patterns, developmental policies, and economic ideologies that generated distinctly national, as opposed to global, economic spaces within nineteenth-century capitalism.