Introduction

As a globally shared world literature, the crime fiction genre, following Beecroft's model, constitutes an ecology of co-existing works that connect national literatures to a global world literature system. The genre sprawls over time periods and spills over its generic borders to connect to other ecologies, depending on how crime fiction is defined. Sophocles's Oedipus Rex, for example, can be seen as crime fiction, as can the oral folklore tales of the world about life, death, justice systems and punishment, or religious and mythological writings encompassing crimes. The multifaceted crime fiction genre is well-known for representing its own sociopolitical context and posing social critique through its narratives. Often it serves as a gateway within scholarly research to topics such as ethnicity, gender, or class, and in relation to the nation-state, views on crimes, and injustice. As a whole, crime fiction is a globally circulated national literature, born out of modernity, with roots in urbanization and technological changes. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the genre evolved into a highly successful entertainment industry on the international book market, governed by multimedia conglomerates. The literature's geographical belongings often serve as a marketing strategy and tool for organizing foreign novels, for example, as Swedish Crime Fiction, Scandinavian Crime Fiction, or Nordic Noir.

In crime fiction, place holds a key position as it connects the narratives to claims of national belonging. Place gives crime stories a scenic framing and, in doing so, these stories become ambassadors for their countries of origin or particular cities like Beijing, Cairo, London, Los Angeles, or Milan. Crime narratives must be located somewhere in a particular city, jurisdiction, state, or country. These geographical places function as backdrops for the story, even when the local settings in the narratives stretch out far beyond national borders and into the global. Thus, recent crime fiction studies argue for readings that look beyond the novels’ national traditions, to focus instead on ideas about global injustice that transgress national borders. As such, the classic “scene of the crime” in these narratives becomes a means to examine how a crime in a very particular local milieu intersects with, and has implications for, a wider set of global issues and efforts to police crime at a global rather than at a merely national or local level.

During the first two decades of his career, Richardson's role as printer was hardly limited to setting the type for the periodicals that were issued from his shop. Perhaps the most glaring evidence of his intervention in producing text is the fact that both The True Briton and The Weekly Miscellany just happen to have letters supposedly from women who protested the legal restraints against their participation in the public sphere. Neither the Duke of Wharton, the owner of The True Briton, nor William Webster, the desperately impecunious producer of The Weekly Miscellany, launched their journals with the objective of advancing radical views about political equality for women. But almost inadvertently, this middle-aged, rotund printer at Salisbury Court was quietly feminizing journalism.

As an outlier in what was perceived to be a corrupt, predatory political world, Richardson readily assumed a female role as victim and the subversive strategy of passive resistance. The Non-juror TB females voiced dilemmas over being required to swear oaths of loyalty to a government that their consciences could not support:

This oath of obedience to government authority also includes the dilemma concerning marriage vows and the legal dominance of husbands over wives, as Sarah Chapone argues:

The stories of turmoil discussed here reflect the convoluted and culturally complex relationships developed over the years among landlord-indigene communities, strangers including companies, and the state in mining spaces. Caught between a rock and a hard place are chiefs as traditional governance leaders and government officials of a peripheral country. In colonial history, chiefs are largely accused of oppression, authoritarianism, terrorism, slave trading, and sustaining a gerontocracy that exploits and marginalizes youth. These behaviors were justification to establish a Protectorate under the supervision of Great Britain according to District Commissioner Thomas Alldridge who signed several treaties with chiefs. The creation of the Frontier Police Force in 1893 to enforce this policy was no less ruthless. The force was so feared that locals sometimes abandoned their farms and hid in the forests to escape the intimidation and brutality. The subsequent Protectorate Ordinance established state dominance over the chieftaincy governance which has been in place since. Chiefs govern within the framework of the state and in many ways are caught between their traditional roles and the state's expectations of their leadership (Abraham 2003; Alldridge 1910; Conteh 2013; Fyfe 1962; Peters 2011).

Specific to development projects, chiefs are caught between the forces of tradition and modernity. They both benefit from and object to the actions of development projects like mining. Chiefs frequently protest and petition the national government as we have seen in earlier examples discussed (Akiwumi 2018). Nevertheless, discord arises between them and their subjects, particularly young people who see chiefs as complicit in projects. A farmer impacted by a large land development project summarized the view of chiefs as a party to long-term leases from a landlord-indigenes perspective:

My goal in this book was to explore cultural dynamics (cultural alienation, cultural hybridity, cultural resistance, and cultural evolution) embedded in a world system commodity chain. I devised a conceptual model combining premises from world systems and postcolonial theories and the landlord– stranger paradigm to analyze and better understand the cultural differences in mining that are a root cause of persistent low-intensity conflicts in extraction areas.

I posed some important guiding questions to support my premise of a culturally unequal exchange: To recap: How does the Sierra Leone government address the cultural differences in land management embedded in mineral commodity chains in policy and law? Is there an asymmetric transfer of cultural resources and norms from core and semi-peripheral countries to peripheral nations? Can this transfer be conceptualized as a culturally unequal exchange? Is “illicit” artisanal mining a form of cultural resistance against the impacts of incorporation on customary land rights? Do cultural resistance and cultural hybridity in Sierra Leone mining areas pose challenges to effective incorporation through mineral commodity chains? Can cultural resistance in the Sierra Leone mining sector trigger a development evolution that moves beyond capitalist extractivism toward new development trajectories that embody African cultural values? Or will the continuing marginalization of African cultural perspectives persist in the face of a capitalist global economy inexorably driving toward cultural universalism?

Operating within the commodity chain are Western cultural concepts of mining governed by state laws and indigenous artisanal mining as a timehonored subsistence livelihood managed by the landlord–stranger institution and power associations. The latter is seen as poorly managed and illicit, a colonial legacy, and the former as legal and economically efficient. The cultural differences and power imbalance in this arrangement have generated low-intensity and persistent conflict situations integral to the mining industry in Sierra Leone since its inception.

The state faces legislative and policy dilemmas, a colonial legacy, in trying to reconcile customary land management—the landlord–stranger relationship—with Western notions of mining land use. There have been rapid changes in policies and laws to facilitate mineral extraction amid cultural conflicts. Mining multinationals are privileged and powerful strangers through state laws.