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From the Treaty of Versailles to the 2018 centenary and beyond, the history of the First World War has been continually written and rewritten, studied and contested, producing a rich historiography shaped by the social and cultural circumstances of its creation. Writing the Great War provides a groundbreaking survey of this vast body of work, assembling contributions on a variety of national and regional historiographies from some of the most prominent scholars in the field. By analyzing perceptions of the war in contexts ranging from Nazi Germany to India’s struggle for independence, this is an illuminating collective study of the complex interplay of memory and history.
This collection of papers on the Fulbe is an up-to-date and comprehensive overview of social change in one of the most fascinating group of pastoralists in Africa. Opens new perspectives on this group.
A fascinating collection that advances a renewed conceptual framework for understanding slavery in West Africa today: instead of retracing the end of West African slavery, this work highlights the preliminary contours of its recent reconfigurations.
Postcolonialism, the politics of ethnic and religious identity, and the role of women in African society and politics have become important, and often connected, foci in African studies. Here, fifteen chapters explore these themes in tandem. With essays that span the continent, this volume showcases the political histories, challenges, and promise of contemporary Africa. Written in honor of Crawford Young, a foundational figure in the study of African politics, the essays reflect the breadth and intellectual legacy of this towering scholar and illustrate the vast impact Young had, and continues to have, on the field. The book's themes build from his seminal publications, and the essays were written by leading scholars who were trained by Young.
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As a young man in South Africa, Nelson Mandela aspired to be an interpreter or clerk, noting in his autobiography that “a career as a civil servant was a glittering prize for an African.” Africans in the lower echelons of colonial bureaucracy often held positions of little official authority, but in practice these positions were lynchpins of colonial rule. As the primary intermediaries among European colonial officials, African chiefs, and subject populations, these civil servants could manipulate the intersections of power, authority, and knowledge at the center of colonial society. By uncovering the role of such men (and a few women) in the construction, function, and legal apparatus of colonial states, the essays in this volume highlight a new perspective. They offer important insights on hegemony, collaboration, and resistance, structures and changes in colonial rule, the role of language and education, the production of knowledge and expertise in colonial settings, and the impact of colonization in dividing African societies by gender, race, status, and class.
In this volume, leading historians reflect on the recent biographical turn in studies of slavery and the modern African diaspora. This collection presents vivid glimpses into the lives of remarkable enslaved and formerly enslaved people who moved, struggled, and endured in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic world.
In this innovative new history, Erin Pettigrew utilizes invisible forces and entities - esoteric knowledge and spirits - to show how these forms of knowledge and unseen forces have shaped social structures, religious norms, and political power in the Saharan West. Situating this ethnographic history in what became la Mauritanie under French colonial rule and, later the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, Pettigrew traces the changing roles of Muslim spiritual mediators and their Islamic esoteric sciences - known locally as l'ḥjāb - over the long-term history of the region. By exploring the impact of the immaterial in the material world and demonstrating the importance of Islamic esoteric sciences in Saharan societies, she illuminates peoples' enduring reliance upon these sciences in their daily lives and argues for a new approach to historical research that takes the immaterial seriously.