This book, first published in 1868, became the best-known work of medical officer and writer James Africanus Beale Horton (1835 1883), who was born in Sierra Leone to parents of Igbo descent. He was chosen by the British to train as an army medical officer and attended King's College, London, and Edinburgh University. He returned to West Africa and published his doctoral thesis, which was a medical topography of the region; subsequent works called for health reforms. West African Countries, however, went beyond medicine. In it Horton refutes the derogatory racial theories about Africans rife in Victorian Britain and its empire, and he examines the possibility of self-government and how it might function in Sierra Leone and other territories in West Africa, foreshadowing the decolonisation that took place almost one hundred years later.

Title: West African Countries and Peoples, British and Native, ... and a vindication of the African race.Publisher: British Library, Historical Print EditionsThe British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. It is one of the world's largest research libraries holding over 150 million items in all known languages and formats: books, journals, newspapers, sound recordings, patents, maps, stamps, prints and much more. Its collections include around 14 million books, along with substantial additional collections of manuscripts and historical items dating back as far as 300 BC.The SLAVERY COLLECTIONS include books from the British Library digitised by Microsoft. This collection provides original works on world slavery by writers, abolitionists, historians, theologians, and poets including an examination of the enslavement of Africans and the slave trade. Further works look at the slavery of impoverished children and provide narratives offering firsthand observations.++++The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++ British Library Horton, James Africanus Beale; 1868. 8 . 10095.bbb.30.