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Books > Humanities > History > African history
The Iberian World: 1450-1820 brings together, for the first time in English, the latest research in Iberian studies, providing in-depth analysis of fifteenth- to early nineteenth-century Portugal and Spain, their European possessions, and the African, Asian, and American peoples that were under their rule. Featuring innovative work from leading historians of the Iberian world, the book adopts a strong transnational and comparative approach, and offers the reader an interdisciplinary lens through which to view the interactions, entanglements, and conflicts between the many peoples that were part of it. The volume also analyses the relationships and mutual influences between the wide range of actors, polities, and centres of power within the Iberian monarchies, and draws on recent advances in the field to examine key aspects such as Iberian expansion, imperial ideologies, and the constitution of colonial societies. Divided into four parts and combining a chronological approach with a set of in-depth thematic studies, The Iberian World brings together previously disparate scholarly traditions surrounding the history of European empires and raises awareness of the global dimensions of Iberian history. It is essential reading for students and academics of early modern Spain and Portugal.
The 'Rhodesian crisis' of the 1960s and 1970s, and the early 1980s crisis of independent Zimbabwe, can be understood against the background of Cold War historical transformations brought on by, among other things, African decolonization in the 1960s; the failure of American power in Vietnam and the rise of Third World political power at the UN and elsewhere. In this African history of the diplomacy of decolonization in Zimbabwe, Timothy Lewis Scarnecchia examines the relationship and rivalry between Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe over many years of diplomacy, and how both leaders took advantage of Cold War racialized thinking about what Zimbabwe should be, including Anglo-American preoccupations with keeping whites from leaving after Independence. Based on a wealth of archival source materials, including materials that have recently become available through thirty-year rules in the UK and South Africa, it uncovers how foreign relations bureaucracies the US, UK, and SA created a Cold War 'race state' notion of Zimbabwe that permitted them to rationalize Mugabe's state crimes in return for Cold War loyalty to Western powers.
The French Army's war in Algeria has always aroused passions. This
book does not whitewash the atrocities committed by both sides;
rather it shifts the focus to the conflict itself, a perspective
assisted by the French republic's belated official admission in
1999 that what happened in Algeria was indeed a war. Each
contributor made use of the increasingly liberalised French
archives of the war since the early 1990s. The book re-evaluates
counter-terrorism in the cities; the methods used in the "battle
for hearts and minds" in the villages of the interior; the hitherto
neglected roles of French air and naval power in supporting the
army's counter-insurgency offensives against the Armee de
Liberation Nationale; and the battles that France decisively lost
for both world opinion and for support from her major Western
allies.
The French Army's war in Algeria has always aroused passions. This book does not whitewash the atrocities committed by both sides; rather it focuses on the conflict itself, a perspective assisted by the French republic's official admission in 1999 that what happened in Algeria was indeed a war.
Providing an in-depth comparative study of democracy formation, Gellar traces Senegal's movement from a pre-colonial aristocratic order towards a modern democratic political order. Inspired by Tocqueville's methodology, he identifies social equality, ethnic and religious tolerance, popular participation in local affairs, and freedom of association and the press as vital components of any democratic system. He shows how centralized state structures and monopoly of political power stifled local initiative and perpetuated neo-patrimonial modes of governance.
For nineteenth-century Britons, the rule of law stood at the heart of their constitutional culture, and guaranteed the right not to be imprisoned without trial. At the same time, in an expanding empire, the authorities made frequent resort to detention without trial to remove political leaders who stood in the way of imperial expansion. Such conduct raised difficult questions about Britain's commitment to the rule of law. Was it satisfied if the sovereign validated acts of naked power by legislative forms, or could imperial subjects claim the protection of Magna Carta and the common law tradition? In this pathbreaking book, Michael Lobban explores how these matters were debated from the liberal Cape, to the jurisdictional borderlands of West Africa, to the occupied territory of Egypt, and shows how and when the demands of power undermined the rule of law. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
One of South Africa's best-known writers during the apartheid era, Alex La Guma was a lifelong activist and a member of the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress. Persecuted and imprisoned by the South African regime in the 1950s and 60s, La Guma went into exile in the United Kingdom with his wife and children in 1966, eventually serving as the ANC's diplomatic representative for Latin America and the Caribbean in Cuba. Culture and Liberation captures a different dimension of his long writing career by collecting his political journalism, literary criticism, and other short pieces published while he was in exile. This volume spans La Guma's political and literary life in exile through accounts of his travels to Algeria, Lebanon, Vietnam, Soviet Central Asia, and elsewhere, along with his critical assessments of Paul Robeson, Nadine Gordimer, Maxim Gorky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Pablo Neruda, among other writers. The first dedicated collection of La Guma's exile writing, Culture and Liberation restores an overlooked dimension of his life and work, while opening a window on a wider world of cultural and political struggles in Africa, Asia, and Latin America during the second half of the twentieth century.
Eight Days in September is a riveting, behind-the-scenes account of the turbulent eight-day period in September 2008 that led to the removal of Thabo Mbeki as president of South Africa. As secretary of the cabinet and head (director-general) of the presidency at the time, Frank Chikane was directly responsible for managing the transition from Mbeki to Kgalema Motlanthe, and then on to Jacob Zuma, and was one of only a few who had a front-row seat to the unfolding drama. Eight Days in September builds substantially on the so-called Chikane Files, a series of controversial articles Chikane published with Independent Newspapers in July 2010, to provide an insider's perspective on this key period in South Africa's recent history, and to explore Thabo Mbeki's legacy.
Conceptions of medicine and medical practice among the Kedjom peoples in Cameroon embrace more than western biomedical understandings of medicine. For these peoples, medicine implies substances, knowledge, practices and institutions bound up with protection and intervention against misfortune and the active promotion of well-being. Nor are medical concerns primarily about the individual. Medicine in the precolonial era was a matter for groups. In short, medicine was preeminently public. Perhaps the major transformation since the colonial period and extending into the postcolonial, has been the increasing commercialization of "traditional" medicine as African healers shift their practices away from group concerns to a focus more concerned with treating the individual. Written in a lucid style, full of vibrant anecdotes, Maynard's book will appeal not only to medical anthropologists and development workers, but also to anyone interested in nonwestern medicine and practices.
"Egyptian Mummies" is regarded by egyptologists as the classic account of mummification in ancient Egypt. Originally published in 1924, its re-issue in complete form will be welcomed by all those who have sought rare second hand copies in vain. This book provides the most comprehensive account available of the technical processes and materials employed by the ancient Egyptian embalmers together with a historical analysis of their modification throughout the dynastic period. The authors draw on fully illustrated archaeological and pathological evidence together with Egyptian and Greek textual references to provide a thorough survey of the mummification process and attendant funeral ceremonies, and to offer clues to an understanding of the custom's significance and the reasons for its adoption.
This book examines the representation of figures, memories and images of childhood in selected contemporary diasporic African fiction by Adichie, Abani, Wainaina and Oyeyemi. The book argues that childhood is a key framework for thinking about contemporary African and African Diasporic identities. It argues that through the privileging of childhood memory, alternative conceptions of time emerge in this literature, and which allow African writers to re-imagine what family, ethnicity, nation means within the new spaces of diaspora that a majority of them occupy. The book therefore looks at the connections between childhood, space, time and memory, childhood gender and sexuality, childhoods in contexts of war, as well as migrant childhoods. These dimensions of childhood particularly relate to the return of the memory of Biafra, the figures of child soldiers, memories of growing up in Cold War Africa, queer boyhoods/sonhood as well as experiences of migration within Africa, North America and Europe.
The archives produced by international courts have received little empirical, theoretical or methodological attention within international criminal justice (ICJ) or international relations (IR) studies. Yet, as this book argues, these archives both contain a significant record of past violence, and also help to constitute the international community as a particular reality. As such, this book first offers an interdisciplinary reading of archives, integrating new insights from IR, archival science and post-colonial anthropology to establish the link between archives and community formation. It then focuses on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda's archive, to offer a critical reading of how knowledge is produced in international courts, provides an account of the type of international community that is imagined within these archives, and establishes the importance of the materiality of archives for understanding how knowledge is produced and contested within the international domain.
Living for the City is a social history of the Central African Copperbelt, considered as a single region encompassing the neighbouring mining regions of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Haut Katanga and Zambian Copperbelt mine towns have been understood as the vanguard of urban 'modernity' in Africa. Observers found in these towns new African communities that were experiencing what they wrongly understood as a transition from rural 'traditional' society - stable, superstitious and agricultural - to an urban existence characterised by industrial work discipline, the money economy and conspicuous consumption, Christianity, and nuclear families headed by male breadwinners supported by domesticated housewives. Miles Larmer challenges this representation of Copperbelt society, presenting an original analysis which integrates the region's social history with the production of knowledge about it, shaped by both changing political and intellectual contexts and by Copperbelt communities themselves. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
During the 1980s, religion was widely assumed to have lost its
dominant position in Western culture and to be losing ground
throughout the world. This has not been the case. Today we see an
upsurge in religion worldwide, which has affected people's
spiritual, cultural, economic and political lives.
Long regarded as the preserve of French scholars and Francophone audiences due to its significance to France's colonial empire, North Africa is increasingly recognized for its own singular importance as a crossover region. Situated where Islamic, Mediterranean, African, and European histories intersect, the Maghrib has long acted as a cultural conduit, mediator and broker. From the medieval era, when the oasis of Sijilmasa in the Moroccan wilderness funnelled caravan loads of gold into international networks, through the 16th century when two superpowers, the Ottomans and the Spanish Hapsburgs, battled for mastery of the Mediterranean along the North African frontier, and well into the 20th century which witnessed one of Africa's cruellest wars unfold in "French Algeria," the Maghrib has retained its uniqueness as a place where worlds meet.
Even leaving aside the vast death and suffering that it wrought on indigenous populations, German ambitions to transform Southwest Africa in the early part of the twentieth century were futile for most. For years colonists wrestled ocean waters, desert landscapes, and widespread aridity as they tried to reach inland in their effort of turning outwardly barren lands into a profitable settler colony. In his innovative environmental history, Martin Kalb outlines the development of the colony up to World War I, deconstructing the common settler narrative, all to reveal the importance of natural forces and the Kaisereich's everyday violence.
During the Cold War, writers and artists were faced with a huge challenge. In the Soviet world, they were expected to turn out works that glorified militancy, struggle and relentless optimism. In the West, freedom of expression was vaunted as liberal democracy's most cherished possession. But such freedom could carry a cost. This book documents the extraordinary energy of a secret campaign in which some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom in the West became instruments - whether they knew it or not, whether they liked it or not - of America's secret service.
The author, interviews some South Africans of different hues, about the idea of race, what it has meant to them and how they envision a future South Africa, steeped as the country and its people are in a highly charged and often unacknowledged world of racial sensitivity. Amongst the interviewees are Naledi Pandor, Minister of Education; Wilmot James, executive director of the African Genome Education Institute; Rhoda Kadalie, journalist and human rights activist; Melanie Verwoerd, former South African ambassador to Ireland; Phatekile Holomisa, president of the Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa (Contralesa); and Carel Boshoff, the founder of Orania, an Afrikaner homeland established in 1991 in the Northern Cape.
This book explores the lived experiences of formerly colonized people in the privacy of their homes, communities, workplaces, and classrooms, and the associations created from these social interactions. It examines the centrality of gender and social identity in the formation of non-western people in the British Empire. |
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