This book takes as its theme the ways in which governments legitimate their rule, both to themselves and to their subjects. Its introduction explores legitimacy and pre-colonial states, but the three sections of the book deal with colonial legitimacy, the question of legitimation in the transition from colonialism to majority rule, and the contemporary debate about accountability.

Many of the traditions which we think of as very ancient in their origins were not in fact sanctioned by long usage over the centuries, but were invented comparatively recently. This book explores examples of this process of invention - the creation of Welsh and Scottish 'national culture'; the elaboration of British royal rituals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the origins of imperial rituals in British India and Africa; and the attempts by radical movements to develop counter-traditions of their own. It addresses the complex interaction of past and present, bringing together historians and anthropologists in a fascinating study of ritual and symbolism which poses new questions for the understanding of our history.

Epidemic diseases have always been a test of the ability of human societies to withstand sudden shocks. How are such large mortalities and the illness of large proportions of the population to be explained and dealt with? How have the sources of disease been identified and controls imposed? The chapters in this book, by acknowledged experts in the history of their periods, look at the ways in which the great epidemic diseases of the past--from classical Athens to the present day--have shaped not only our views of medicine and disease, but the ways in which people have defined the "health" of society in general terms.

In this book, distinguished anthropologists, political scientists and social historians from Africa, Europe and America make a radical break with much conventional wisdom in postcolonial discourse to explore contemporary African identities in transition. They look at the colonial legacy and how colonial identities are being reconstructed in the face of deepening social inequality across the continent. They ask how the postcolonial imagination as a highly specific, locally created and historical force reconfigures personal knowledge and how that reconfiguration shapes the moral and religious realities around the uses and abuses of postcolonial power. Using case-studies, the book explores why postcolonial studies has to enunciate and interpret the distinctive languages of identity politics in all the cultural richness of their specific metaphors. It asks whether the very idea of the postcolonial conceals the continued dependence of African countries? Is the postcolonial thus merely a neo-colonial mystification, a Eurocentric product of Western scholarship in collusion with Western imperialism?