Books in the African Studies series

In this study of salt production and trade, Professor Lovejoy examines the interaction between ecology, technology and social structure as a means of analysing the organisation of the salt industry of the Sokoto Caliphate and Borno in central Sudan.

A long-term analysis of development projects in rural Tanzania, tracing the improvised, reactive nature of small-scale interventions, aimed at staving off the threat posed by acute poverty to local governments' legitimacy and effectiveness.

Essays, from an African perspective, on the nineteenth-century commercial transition in West Africa.

Focusing on the politics of democratization in Africa, this book details the strategic choices of the political elite, both incumbent and opposition, within the context of transition politics.

This book details the devastating Mau Mau civil war fought in Kenya during the 1950s and the legacies of that conflict for the post-colonial state. Branch explores the instrumental use of violence, changes to allegiances, and the ways in which cleavages created by the war informed local politics for decades after the conflict's conclusion.

This book discusses the minority status of African immigrants in the New World by revisiting the concept of a 'new' African diaspora and its multiple implications for citizenship and immigration policy.

This social and economic history of Mauritius, from French colonization in 1721 to the mid-1930s, describes changing relationships between different elements in the society, slave, free and maroon, and East Indian indentured populations. First published in 1999, it brings the Mauritian case to the attention of scholars of slavery and plantation systems.

This history of African slavery from the fifteenth to the early twentieth centuries examines how indigenous African slavery developed within an international context. The new edition revises statistical material and incorporates recent research.

Based on long-term research in an area long closed to researchers, this book provides an internal account of trans-border connectivity, armed conflict, labour and gender relations, and aspirations to political autonomy in northern Chad. It sheds light on current Saharan political developments, and adds a new perspective to Saharan studies.

Whereas border regions are often treated as marginal, Paul Nugent demonstrates through a comparison of two African sub-regions that they are in fact vital in the process of shaping state forms and forging social contracts. Border regions are fundamental to the making of regional and national economies and to patterns of contemporary urbanism.

Nineteenth-century Cape Town, the capital of the British Cape Colony, was conventionally regarded as a liberal oasis in an otherwise racist South Africa. Vivian Bickford-Smith skilfully interweaves political, economic and social analysis to show that the English merchant class, far from being liberal, were generally as racist as Afrikaner farmers.

This is a major contribution to the social, political and intellectual history of the French West African Federation. Focusing on French policy towards Islam, it sheds light on a wide range of issues, from the grand strategy of French imperialism to the psychology of individual administrators in isolated outposts of the empire.

This pioneering study was first published in 1988. It examines the effects of revolution on one of Africa's largest states. Christopher Clapham traces the continuities between revolutionary Ethiopia and the development of a centralised Ethiopian state since the nineteenth century, emphasising the institutionalisation of the revolutionary regime since 1978.

In this first major historical study of Islam among the Swahili, Randall Pouwels shows how Islam and other aspects of coastal civilization have evolved since about AD 1000 as an organic whole.

This collection of essays brings together historians and political scientists from Britain, France and the United States, who, from widely differing perspectives and traditions, have been involved in the process of rethinking African politics. They present here the outline of a new approach, grounded in universal political theory rather than on theories of Third World political development.

This history of African motherhood over the longue duree demonstrates that it was, ideologically and practically, central to social, economic, cultural and political life. The book explores how people in the North Nyanzan societies of Uganda used an ideology of motherhood to shape their communities. More than biology, motherhood created essential social and political connections that cut across patrilineal and cultural-linguistic divides. The importance of motherhood as an ideology and a social institution meant that in chiefdoms and kingdoms queen mothers were powerful officials who legitimated the power of kings. This was the case in Buganda, the many kingdoms of Busoga, and the polities of Bugwere. By taking a long-term perspective from c.700 to 1900 CE and using an interdisciplinary approach - drawing on historical linguistics, comparative ethnography, and oral traditions and literature, as well as archival sources - this book shows the durability, mutability and complexity of ideologies of motherhood in this region.

This 1985 comprehensive study analyses slavery in early colonial South Africa under the Dutch East India Company (1652-1795). Based on archival research in Britain, the Netherlands and South Africa, it examines the nature of Cape slavery with reference to the literature on other slave societies.

This comprehensive history of Niger during the colonial period is a work based on primary research which attempts an overall appraisal of the colonial past. Dr Fuglestad questions the assumption that the colonial conquest constituted a clear break in African history.

This book addresses several of the classic questions in African Studies. In answering these questions, the book explores various forms of explanation and advances a form of political economy based upon rational-choice analysis.

In this study, Dr Mosley considers the economies of colonial Kenya and Southern Rhodesia and argues at the level of policy, most white producers acknowledged that they could not afford to let 'white mate black in a very few moves': they needed his cheap labour, cattle and maize too much to wish to damage seriously the peasant economy that sustained them.

Volkskapitalisme analyses the development of Afrikaner nationalism from the early thirties to the election victory of the Nationalist Party in 1948. The book sets out to refute the commonly held belief that the nationalist policies of apartheid are simply the product of 'irrational' racial ideology.

This book examines the history of the colonial conquest of a neglected region of Angola from an alternative perspective. Dr Clarence-Smith has used advances in Marxist theory to develop a model of the early colonial period which differs greatly from the established historiography of `African resistance'.

The popular image of the Kalahari is a romantic one of desert space and untouched Bushmen.

First published in 1978, this study analyses the political history and sociology of one particular group - the railway workers of Ghana's third city, Sekondi-Takoradi, who are renowned for their leading role in the Ghanaian nationalist movement and for their sustained opposition to the elitism and authoritarianism of post-Independence governments.

This book examines the ways in which racial and economic stratification were brought to coincide in pre-industrial South Africa by describing in detail the history of one group, the Griquas of Philippolis and Kokstad.

The study concludes that instead of being a separating step to remove colonial influence, decolonization in more important respects ensured the continuity of the colonial political economy. The book is of interest to scholars, students and others interested in decolonization, white settles, East African affairs and land reform, as well as the general reader following current events in Africa.

This book surveys the field of industrialisation in Ghana and its effects through such other factors as migration. It provides a valuable comparison both with industrialisation elsewhere and with other aspects of African social life.

An account of the Nigerian military coups of 1966 in which the author discusses both the events themselves and their sociological background.

The first comprehensive narrative of French involvement in Chad's civil wars in the first two decades of its independence between 1960 and 1982, this study explores France's counterinsurgency efforts to protect the regime of Francois Tombalbaye and its contribution to the rise to power of Hissene Habre, one of Africa's most notorious dictators.