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Books > Humanities > History > African history
Bronwen Everill offers a new perspective on African global history,
applying a comparative approach to freed slave settlers in Sierra
Leone and Liberia to understand their role in the anti-slavery
colonization movements of Britain and America.
Wanneer ’n mens aan die ervarings van Boerevroue en -kinders tydens
die Anglo-Boereoorlog dink, is die outomatiese konnotasie die van
konsentrasiekamplyding. ’n Fassinerende en grotendeels onbekende
buitebeentjie in hierdie genre is die dagboek van Anna Barry,
waaruit ’n unieke en veelkantige beeld van die oorlog na vore kom.
Aan die een kant van Anna se oorlogservaring staan haar broer Japie
– ’n begeesterde jong soldaat wat uiteindelik as krygsgevangene op
Ceylon sterf. Hierteenoor le haar geliefde pa Thomas (aanvanklik ’n
gerespekteerde veldkornet) al in 1900 die eed van neutraliteit af,
en wag hy die grootste gedeelte van die oorlog in die neutrale
Basoetoland uit. Vir die tienderjarige Anna is die oorlog as gevolg
hiervan ’n uiters verwarrende ervaring en haar dagboek bied ’n
sonderlinge blik op die gefragmenteerdheid en buigbaarheid van
konsepte soos “identiteit”, “nasie” en “volk”. Die feit dat die
dagboek eers in 1960 vir die eerste keer gepubliseer is en daarna
grotendeels in die vergetelheid verval het, is verder veelseggend
in terme van hoe Anna self verwag het haar ervarings kort na die
oorlog ontvang sou word – maar ook in terme van hoe blinde
lojaliteit aan sekere groepe so dikwels in die geskiedenis van
Suid-Afrikaners vereis is. Die dagboekteks, geboekstut deur Ena
Jansen se insiggewende en verhelderende voor- en nawoord, bied nie
slegs ’n sonderlinge blik op die Anglo-Boereoorlog nie, maar is
verweef met kwessies van taal, politieke mag en sosiale status wat
vandag nog net so relevant is soos toe die dagboek geskryf is.
This volume offers a comprehensive history and analysis of the
Democratic Republic of the Congo during the tumultuous period of
1997-2001. The author examines the most recent events in this
turbulent region, offering a contemporary account that is both
extensive and detailed.
Knowledge And Global Power is a ground-breaking international study which examines how knowledge is produced, distributed and validated globally.
The former imperial nations – the rich countries of Europe and North America – still have a hegemonic position in the global knowledge economy. Fran Collyer, Raewyn Connell, João Maia and Robert Morrell, using interviews, databases and fieldwork, show how intellectual workers respond in three Southern tier countries, Brazil, South Africa and Australia. The study focuses on new, socially and politically important research fields: HIV/AIDS, climate change and gender studies.
The research demonstrates emphatically that ‘place matters’, shaping research, scholarship and knowledge itself. But it also shows that knowledge workers in the global South have room to move, setting agendas and forming local knowledge.
The story is set during the closing years of the eighteenth dynasty
in ancient Egypt. It covers the rise of an ambitious child of a
farmer, as he successfully climbs the ladder of power, until he
wears the crown of the Pharaoh of all Egypt. During his rise, the
novel tries to follow the accepted history of the known rulers. We
meet Akhenaton and Nefertiti, Tutankhamen, and Ankhesenamun, and
also Horemheb and Mutnedjmet. Many more known and unknown
characters appear as we tie the story together. There is intrigue,
treachery, and murder, as well as love, sadness, and joy. It's a
bit of a saga as individuals come and go. This era of Egyptian
history, for all of its study, has many blanks, and this story
attempts to fill them in. It is my hope that you will read it with
interest and pleasure.
Late in 1755, an army of British regulars and Massachusetts
volunteers completed one of the cruelest, most successful military
campaigns in North American history, capturing and deporting seven
thousand French-speaking Catholic Acadians from the province of
Nova Scotia, and chasing an equal number into the wilderness of
eastern Canada. Thousands of Acadians endured three decades of
forced migrations and failed settlements that shuttled them to the
coasts of South America, the plantations of the Caribbean, the
frigid islands of the South Atlantic, the swamps of Louisiana, and
the countryside of central France. The Acadian Diaspora tells their
extraordinary story in full for the first time, illuminating a
long-forgotten world of imperial desperation, experimental
colonies, and naked brutality. Using documents culled from archives
in France, Great Britain, Canada, and the United States,
Christopher Hodson reconstructs the lives of Acadian exiles as they
traversed oceans and continents, pushed along by empires eager to
populate new frontiers with inexpensive, pliable white farmers.
Hodson's compelling narrative situates the Acadian diaspora within
the dramatic geopolitical changes triggered by the Seven Years'
War. Faced with redrawn boundaries and staggering national debts,
imperial architects across Europe used the Acadians to realize
radical plans: tropical settlements without slaves, expeditions to
the unknown southern continent, and, perhaps strangest of all,
agricultural colonies within old regime France itself. In response,
Acadians embraced their status as human commodities, using
intimidation and even violence to tailor their communities to the
superheated Atlantic market for cheap, mobile labor. Through vivid,
intimate stories of Acadian exiles and the diverse, transnational
cast of characters that surrounded them, The Acadian Diaspora
presents the eighteenth-century Atlantic world from a new angle,
challenging old assumptions about uprooted peoples and the very
nature of early modern empire.
The Mummy, A Handbook of Egyptian Funerary Archaeology is linguist
and Orientalist E.A. Wallis Budge's detailed overview of Egyptian
funeral practices and beliefs. Included is a history of Egypt, as
well as the translation of common hieroglyphs, to augment readers'
understanding of Egyptian culture. He describes in detail the
wrapping and burying of mummies, the attendants to the tombs and
the dead, drawings and hieroglyphs found on tomb walls, coffins and
sarcophagi, treasures buried with the dead, and scarabs, among
other things. This book is a beautiful complement to The Book of
the Dead, which describes the Egyptian afterlife and the
motivations for detailed and drawn-out burials. This edition is the
revised and enlarged edition, originally published in 1925. SIR
ERNEST ALFRED THOMPSON WALLIS BUDGE (1857-1934) was born in Bodmin,
Cornwall in the UK and discovered an interest in languages at a
very early age. Budge spent all his free time learning and
discovering Semitic languages, including Assyrian, Syriac, and
Hebrew. Eventually, through a close contact, he was able to acquire
a job working with Egyptian and Iraqi artifacts at the British
Museum. Budge excavated and deciphered numerous cuneiform and
hieroglyphic documents, contributing vastly to the museum's
collection. Eventually, he became the Keeper of his department,
specializing in Egyptology. Budge wrote many books during his
lifetime, most specializing in Egyptian life, religion, and
language.
This personal memoir composed by a medieval scholar reveals an
important discourse with two Ismaili leaders who spearheaded the
Fatimid revolution in North Africa in 909-910. By reporting the
thoughts and activities of Abu 'Abdallah al-Shi'i and his brother
Abu'l-Abbas over a period of seven months, Ibn al-Haytham in his
Kitab al-Munazarat (The Book of Discussions) provides an
unparalleled insider's view to the foundations of the Fatimid
state. As such, it is a unique document in the literature of early
Islamic revolutionary movements as much as it represents one of the
most valuable sources for the history of the medieval Muslim
world.
Violent Accounts presents a compelling study of how ordinary people
commit extraordinary acts of violence and how perpetrators and
victims manage in the aftermath. Grounded in extensive, qualitative
analysis of perpetrator testimony, the volume reveals the
individual experiences of perpetrators as well as general patterns
of influence that lead to collective violence. Drawing on public
testimony from the amnesty hearings of the South African Truth and
Reconciliation Commission, the book interweaves hundreds of hours
of testimony from seventy-four violent perpetrators in apartheid
South Africa, including twelve major cases that involved direct
interactions between victims and perpetrators. The analysis of
perpetrator testimony covers all tiers on the hierarchy of
organized violence, from executives who translated political
doctrine into general strategies, to managers who translated these
general strategies into specific plans, to the staff-the foot
soldiers-who carried out the destructive plans of these managers.
Vivid and accessible, Violent Accounts is a work of innovative
scholarship that transcends the particulars of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission to reveal broader themes and unexpected
insights about perpetrators of collective violence, the
confrontations between victims and perpetrators in the aftermath of
this violence, the reality of multiple truths, the complexities of
reconciliation, and lessons of restorative justice.
Neopatrimonial analysts attribute the failure of development
policies in Nigeria to entirely internal problems emanating from
the personalization of state resources by rulers for their own
benefits and as forms of patronage for securing the loyalty of
clients. Based on elaborate theoretical and empirical analysis of
development policies in Nigeria with special focus on development
planning, this book argues that the neopatrimonial analysis is
one-sided and does not adequately capture the fundamental factors
responsible for the development malaise in the country.
Understanding Nigeria's development problems entails looking beyond
neopatrimonialism. The adverse effects of diffusionism that
underlined development policies, and the associated external
factors that fostered neocolonial dependence and peripheralization
of Nigeria's economy are crucial for understanding and coming to
terms with the development problem. This book makes a strong case
for endogenous formulation of development policies and for the
reformulation of the Nigerian state in order to make it more
developmental.
Ghana has always held a position of primacy in the African
political and historical imagination, due in no small part to the
indelible impression left president Kwame Nkrumah. This study
examines the symbolic strategies he used to construct the Ghanaian
state through currency, stamps, museums, flags, and other public
icons.
Whether by falling prey to Algerian corsairs or crashing onto the
desert shores of Western Sahara, a handful of Americans in the
first years of the Republic found themselves enslaved in a system
that differed so markedly from nineteenth century U.S. slavery that
some contemporaries and modern scholars hesitate to categorize
their experiences as 'slavery.' Sears uses a comparative approach,
placing African enslavement of Americans and Europeans in the
context of Mediterranean and Ottoman slaveries, while individually
investigating the system of slavery in Algiers and Western Sahara.
This work illuminates the commonalities and peculiarities of these
slaveries, while contributing to a growing body of literature that
showcases the flexibility of slavery as an institution.
The history of development has paid only little attention to
cultural projects. This book looks at the development politics that
shaped the UNESCO World Heritage programme, with a case study of
Ethiopian World Heritage sites from the 1960s to the 1980s. In a
large-scale conservation and tourism planning project, selected
sites were set up and promoted as images of the Ethiopian nation.
This story serves to illustrate UNESCO's role in constructing a
"useful past" in many African countries engaged in the process of
nation-building. UNESCO experts and Ethiopian elites had a shared
interest in producing a portfolio of antiquities and national parks
to underwrite Ethiopia's imperial claims to regional hegemony with
ancient history. The key findings of this book highlight a
continuity in Ethiopian history, despite the political ruptures
caused by the 1974 revolution and UNESCO's transformation from
knowledge producer to actual provider of development policies. The
particular focus on the bureaucratic and political practices of
heritage, bridges a gap between cultural heritage studies and the
history of international organisations. The result is a first study
of the global discourse on heritage as it emerged in the 1960s
development decade.
This ground-breaking book offers unique insights into the careers
of Indian doctors in colonial Kenya during the height of British
colonialism, between 1895 and 1940. The story of these important
Indian professionals presents a rare social history of an important
political minority.
Born to an African king in colonial Sierra Leone at the
beginning of the twentieth century, Princess Fatima Massaquoi lived
an extraordinary life that encapsulated the contradictions,
upheavals, and unprecedented opportunities of her time. This
critical edition of her memoirs makes her story available to
readers for the first time. Beginning with her lovingly recounted
memories of growing up in Liberia, it follows her to Hamburg,
Germany, where she pursued an education and forged friendships, but
also experienced the racism, terror, and nationalistic fervor that
accompanied the Nazis' rise to power. In the face of these mounting
dangers, Massaquoi traveled to the United States, where she
furthered her studies, embracing her newfound freedom even as she
observed deteriorating conditions in the segregated American South
in the early years of the civil rights movement. Spanning
continents and cultures, this narrative introduces us to a truly
remarkable woman while offering a fascinating window into the
complex history of the twentieth century.
This book transforms our understanding of the recent political
history of Central Africa. It charts the complex life and thought
of Harry Nkumbula (ca. 1917-1983), the first openly nationalist
African politician in Northern Rhodesia and, later, the leader of
parliamentary opposition during Zambia's multi-party First
Republic. Based mainly on his personal papers and the newly opened
archives of UNIP, Zambia's ruling party between 1964 and 1991, the
volume looks at how Nkumbula imagined a Zambian nation for the
first time and, later, presented a liberal alternative to dominant
state-led models of political and economic development. By
exploring the trajectory of Nkumbula's ANC, a minority liberal
party with strong ethnic roots, the book throws new light on the
under-acknowledged fractiousness of Zambian nationalism and warns
against reading African post-colonial politics solely in terms of
clientelism.
A microcosmic study of nineteenth century British imperialism.
The history of the modern world can be described through the
history of the commodities that were produced, traded and consumed,
on an increasingly global scale. The papers presented in this book
show how in this process borders were transgressed, local agents
combined with metropolitan representatives, power relations were
contested and frontiers expanded. Including cases from Asia, Africa
and the Americas, as well as a number of global commodities (sugar,
tobacco, rubber, cotton, cassava, tea and beer), this collection
presents a sample of the range of innovative research taking place
today into commodity history. Together they cover the last two
centuries, in which commodities have led the consolidation of a
globalised economy and society - forging this out of distinctive
local experiences of cultivation and production, and regional
circuits of trade.
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