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Africa is a continent rich in history, culture, and diversity. From the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Ethiopia to the colonial era and struggles for independence, Africa's history is a tapestry of triumphs, challenges, and resilience. The history of Africa dates back thousands of years, with evidence of early human ancestors found in regions such as the Great Rift Valley. Ancient civilizations like the Kingdom of Kush, the Mali Empire, and the Kingdom of Aksum flourished, leaving behind impressive architectural wonders and cultural legacies that continue to inspire awe today. The continent's history was forever changed with the arrival of European colonizers in the 15th century. The scramble for Africa led to the exploitation of its resources, the imposition of colonial rule, and the devastating effects of the transatlantic slave trade. Despite these challenges, African nations fought for independence in the 20th century, leading to the birth of new nations and the struggl...

Labour and Love: A Herstory of Work and Childcare in the Industrial Revolution In 1871, Ruth Holdsworth walked through the streets of Leeds on her way to work weaving wool, worsted and flax in a textile mill. Working women were a common sight in northern towns during the industrial revolution, as they travelled to factories, workshops and mines to make money for their families. Some 750,000 working women in this period were also mothers. Both historians and contemporaries have claimed that factory mothers spent the working day away from their infants and children, as the 19th-century industrious period ended any form of control these women had over their working lives. This separation dictated who did what work and where they did it, leading women to be pushed out of the public sphere into domestic spaces. Working-class women’s inability to combine waged work with childcare bit hard when insufficiency of a husband’s earnings forced mothers out to work. If they were to venture out, they...

Women, Nature, and Capital in the Industrial Revolution The remarkable rise in recent years of “social reproduction theory” within the Marxist and revolutionary feminist traditions, identified with the studies of such figures as Johanna Brenner, Heather Brown, Paresh Chattopadhyay, Silvia Federici, Susan Ferguson, Leopoldina Fortunati, Nancy Fraser, Frigga Haug, David McNally, Maria Mies, Ariel Salleh, Lise Vogel, and Judith Whitehead—to name just a few—has significantly altered how we look at Karl Marx’s (and Frederick Engels’s) treatment of women and work in nineteenth-century Britain.1 Three conclusions with respect to Marx’s analysis are now so well established by contemporary scholarship that they can be regarded as definitive facts: (1) Marx made an extensive, detailed examination of the exploitation of women as wage slaves within capitalist industry, in ways that were crucial to his overall critique of capital; (2) his assessment of women’s working conditions was seriously defic...