Child Labor in the Gold Coast: The Economics of Work, Education, and the Family in Late-Colonial African Childhoods, c. 1940-57

Historical knowledge of childhood in the Gold Coast (modern Ghana) is sparse and too often disconnected from a global historiography that has convincingly demonstrated the "child" to be a social construct. In contemporary discourse the "African child" is most commonly portrayed as either aspiring scholar or helpless victim—images that are echoed in the fleeting appearances of children in Africanist historiography. This essay, by contrast, explores the economic aspects of childhood in the colonial periphery and paints a more complex picture of the "African child." Children in the twentieth-century Gold Coast were vital economic actors and agents: at once producers, consumers, and accumulators of wealth. They remained so despite the political and commercial upheavals of the colonial period. Exploring the economic use and the social purpose of child labor illuminates both the material experience of children and their place in the household and wider society—and it sheds light, too, on the question of why both illiteracy and child labor are stubbornly persistent in modern Ghana

Spatial Approaches to the History of Child Labour in Colonial Ghana

This article uses spatial analysis to explore the nature of child labour in colonial Ghana (the Gold Coast). Spatial analysis of traditional archival sources and secondary literature demonstrates that our historical knowledge of child labour is narrowly focused on the colony’s most ‘colonial’ spaces and institutions. This article uses a novel set of sources – primarily autobiographies and probation records – to begin filling in the epistemological void surrounding the use of child labour in the domestic economy. Spatial analysis of these sources reveals that children were vital economic actors at scales ranging from the hearth and the household, to the town and the region. Child labour was used within the household to produce directly and to increase the mobility of more productive adults. Child labour was also key to the articulation of the household to wider economic spaces. The colonial period saw dramatic spatial changes in the use of child labour. Children began to work in new places, in new ways and at a greater distance from their natal household – these processes shed light on how the socio-economic and geopolitical reshaping of West Africa impacted upon the everyday lives of individual children

An evolutionary approach to Function

The distinction between function and role is a vexed and difficult one. While the distinction appears to be useful, in practice it is hard to apply; this can be even worse when applying this distinction to biology. In this paper, I take an evolutionary approach, considering a series of examples, to develop and generate definitions for these concepts. I test them in practice against work performed on the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI). Finally, I give an axiomatisation and discuss methods for applying these definitions in practice

The Concept of Equality in Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise

A version of this paper was first presented at the conference The Radical Enlightenment: the Big Picture and its Details in Brussels in May 2013. I would like to thank Steffen Ducheyne and the organizing team at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and to acknowledge the many helpful comments I received from listeners there and at subsequent events. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewer who suggested several helpful refinements.Peer reviewedPostprin