African History: A Very Short Introduction PDF Download

Author: John Parker
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0192802488
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
Intended for those interested in the African continent and the diversity of human history, this work looks at Africa's past and reflects on the changing ways it has been imagined and represented. It illustrates key themes in modern thinking about Africa's history with a range of historical examples.

Author: Robert Harms
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1541699661
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
A prizewinning historian's epic account of the scramble to control equatorial Africa In just three decades at the end of the nineteenth century, the heart of Africa was utterly transformed. Virtually closed to outsiders for centuries, by the early 1900s the rainforest of the Congo River basin was one of the most brutally exploited places on earth. In Land of Tears, historian Robert Harms reconstructs the chaotic process by which this happened. Beginning in the 1870s, traders, explorers, and empire builders from Arabia, Europe, and America moved rapidly into the region, where they pioneered a deadly trade in ivory and rubber for Western markets and in enslaved labor for the Indian Ocean rim. Imperial conquest followed close behind. Ranging from remote African villages to European diplomatic meetings to Connecticut piano-key factories, Land of Tears reveals how equatorial Africa became fully, fatefully, and tragically enmeshed within our global world.

Author: Professor G Bruce Strang
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1472400658
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 593

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Book Description
Italy's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 marked a turning point in interwar Europe. The last great European colonial conquest in Africa, the conflict represented an enormous gamble for the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. He faced a challenge not only from a stout Ethiopian defence, but also from difficult logistics made worse by the League of Nations' half-hearted sanctions. Mussolini faced down this opposition, and Italian troops, aided by air superiority and liberal use of yprite gas, conquered Addis Ababa within eight months, a victory that shocked many military observers of the time with its speed and suddenness. The invasion had enormous repercussions on European international relations. In the midst of a national election campaign, the British National Government had felt constrained to support the League, despite fears that sanctions through the League could lead to war with Italy. The concentration of the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean Sea alienated Mussolini and placed the French government on the horns of dilemma; should France support its military partner, Italy, or its more important potential ally, Great Britain? French attempts to mark out a middle ground did little to placate the Duce, and the crisis seemed to develop a deep rift between Fascist Italy and the Anglo-French democracies, while at the same time creating a crisis in Anglo-French relations. Mussolini turned towards Nazi Germany in an attempt to end his diplomatic isolation during the sanctions episode, although Hitler considered the Duce's friendship a mixed blessing. The question of American adherence to sanctions increased ill will between British politicians and the Roosevelt administration in Washington, as each tended to blame the other for the failure of oil sanctions and the collapse of collective security. The international crisis posed similarly thorny problems for the smaller powers of Europe, and for Japan and the Soviet Union. The crisis impeded common defence against Fascist expansionism while giving impetus to claims of the revisionist powers. Despite the tremendous importance of the international crisis, however, little new work on the subject has appeared in recent decades. In this volume, an international cast of contributors take a fresh look at the crisis through the lens of new evidence and new approaches to international relations history to provide the most comprehensive coverage of the crisis currently possible, and their work provides new frames of reference for exploring imperialism, collective security and genocide.

Author: Raymond Jonas
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674062795
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description
In March 1896 a well-disciplined and massive Ethiopian army did the unthinkable-it routed an invading Italian force and brought Italy's war of conquest in Africa to an end. In an age of relentless European expansion, Ethiopia had successfully defended its independence and cast doubt upon an unshakable certainty of the age-that sooner or later all Africans would fall under the rule of Europeans. This event opened a breach that would lead, in the aftermath of world war fifty years later, to the continent's painful struggle for freedom from colonial rule. Raymond Jonas offers the first comprehensive account of this singular episode in modern world history. The narrative is peopled by the ambitious and vain, the creative and the coarse, across Africa, Europe, and the Americas-personalities like Menelik, a biblically inspired provincial monarch who consolidated Ethiopia's throne; Taytu, his quick-witted and aggressive wife; and the Swiss engineer Alfred Ilg, the emperor's close advisor. The Ethiopians' brilliant gamesmanship and savvy public relations campaign helped roll back the Europeanization of Africa. Figures throughout the African diaspora immediately grasped the significance of Adwa, Menelik, and an independent Ethiopia. Writing deftly from a transnational perspective, Jonas puts Adwa in the context of manifest destiny and Jim Crow, signaling a challenge to the very concept of white dominance. By reopening seemingly settled questions of race and empire, the Battle of Adwa was thus a harbinger of the global, unsettled century about to unfold.

Author: Bruce Vandervort
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134223811
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
First Published in 1998. The aim of this book is to examine the origins and conduct of colonial warfare in Africa in the late nineteenth century, as far as possible from the perspectives both of the European invaders and the African resisters, and in the process to demonstrate the impact, both immediate and long-term, of these wars upon the societies, political structures and military theory and practice of both victors and vanquished. Vandervort has written this book with the student and general reader in mind; scholarly apparatus has been kept to a minimum. The book which follows takes as its point of departure the belief that we have now reached a point in our understanding of the military history of the partition of Africa where it is possible to begin to draw some meaningful general conclusions.

Author: Walter Rodney
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788731204
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
“A call to arms in the class struggle for racial equity”—the hugely influential work of political theory and history, now powerfully introduced by Angela Davis (Los Angeles Review of Books). This legendary classic on European colonialism in Africa stands alongside C.L.R. James’ Black Jacobins, Eric Williams’ Capitalism & Slavery, and W.E.B. Dubois’ Black Reconstruction. In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, South America, the African continent, and the Caribbean. In each locale, Rodney found himself a lightning rod for working class Black Power. His deportation catalyzed 20th century Jamaica's most significant rebellion, the 1968 Rodney riots, and his scholarship trained a generation how to think politics at an international scale. In 1980, shortly after founding of the Working People's Alliance in Guyana, the 38-year-old Rodney would be assassinated. In his magnum opus, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Rodney incisively argues that grasping "the great divergence" between the west and the rest can only be explained as the exploitation of the latter by the former. This meticulously researched analysis of the abiding repercussions of European colonialism on the continent of Africa has not only informed decades of scholarship and activism, it remains an indispensable study for grasping global inequality today.

Author: Trevor R. Getz
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190238747
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
This is an illustrated "graphic history" based on an 1876 court transcript of a West African woman named Abina, who was wrongfully enslaved and took her case to court. The main scenes of the story take place in the courtroom, where Abina strives to convince a series of "important men"--A British judge, two Euro-African attorneys, a wealthy African country "gentleman," and a jury of local leaders --that her rights matter.--Publisher description.

Author: Mostafa Minawi
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804799296
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
The Ottoman Scramble for Africa is the first book to tell the story of the Ottoman Empire's expansionist efforts during the age of high imperialism. Following key representatives of the sultan on their travels across Europe, Africa, and Arabia at the close of the nineteenth century, it takes the reader from Istanbul to Berlin, from Benghazi to Lake Chad Basin to the Hijaz, and then back to Istanbul. It turns the spotlight on the Ottoman Empire's expansionist strategies in Africa and its increasingly vulnerable African and Arabian frontiers. Drawing on previously untapped Ottoman archival evidence, Mostafa Minawi examines how the Ottoman participation in the Conference of Berlin and involvement in an aggressive competition for colonial possessions in Africa were part of a self-reimagining of this once powerful global empire. In so doing, Minawi redefines the parameters of agency in late-nineteenth-century colonialism to include the Ottoman Empire and turns the typical framework of a European colonizer and a non-European colonized on its head. Most importantly, Minawi offers a radical revision of nineteenth-century Middle East history by providing a counternarrative to the "Sick Man of Europe" trope, challenging the idea that the Ottomans were passive observers of the great European powers' negotiations over solutions to the so-called Eastern Question.

Author: Erica R. Edwards
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479888532
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
Introduces key terms, interdisciplinary research, debates, and histories for African American Studies As the longest-standing interdisciplinary field, African American Studies has laid the foundation for critically analyzing issues of race, ethnicity, and culture within the academy and beyond. This volume assembles the keywords of this field for the first time, exploring not only the history of those categories but their continued relevance in the contemporary moment. Taking up a vast array of issues such as slavery, colonialism, prison expansion, sexuality, gender, feminism, war, and popular culture, Keywords for African American Studies showcases the startling breadth that characterizes the field. Featuring an august group of contributors across the social sciences and the humanities, the keywords assembled within the pages of this volume exemplify the depth and range of scholarly inquiry into Black life in the United States. Connecting lineages of Black knowledge production to contemporary considerations of race, gender, class, and sexuality, Keywords for African American Studies provides a model for how the scholarship of the field can meet the challenges of our social world.

Author: Gregory Maddox
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351058533
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 672

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Book Description
The articles collected in this study, first published in 1993, concentrates on the transformation and continuities in African societies during the height of the colonial era, and explores the struggles by Africans to find space – socially, politically, or economically – within the confines of colonial rule. This title will be of interest to students of African history and Imperialism.