African History

A beautifully illustrated catalogue to a major exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, exploring enslavement, rebellion, revolution and Abolitionism through art, 1750–1850. Drawing on new research, Rise Up and the accompanying exhibition look at the period from 1750 to 1850 when Britain became the world’s first industrialised nation and one of history’s largest empires. At the same time, it played...

How the suppression of the slave trade and the “disposal” of liberated Africans shaped the emergence of modern humanitarianism Between 1808 and 1867, the British navy’s Atlantic squadrons seized nearly two thousand slave ships, "re‑capturing" almost two hundred thousand enslaved people and resettling them as liberated Africans across sites from Sierra Leone and Cape Colony to the West Indies, Brazil,...

Biotraffic explores the complex world of biological resource trade. It takes readers inside the contemporary Ciskei region of South Africa, a once-notorious apartheid "homeland" turned extractive hub for wild medicinal plants. Drawing from in-depth ethnographic and archival research, Christopher Morris examines the region's trade in Pelargonium sidoides, a plant once contested as a tuberculosis treatment in early twentieth-century Europe and...

An intimate reflection on culture and tradition, creativity and power, that draws on a lifetime’s commitment to aesthetic encounter. The playwright, poet, essayist, novelist, and Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka is also a longtime art collector. This book of essays offers a glimpse into the motivations of the collector, as well as a highly personal look at the politics of aesthetics...

In the late 1950s, like tens of thousands of young men of his generation, Pierre Bourdieu, having recently passed the agrégation in philosophy, found himself immersed in the Algerian war. Motivated by an impulse that, as he himself says, ‘was civic rather than political’, nothing seemed more important to him than to understand the Algerian situation and provide the elements...

The ultimate and authoritative introduction to Songye culture, sculpture, masks, and iron forging This lavishly illustrated book brings a new approach to the masterpieces of Songye, a Bantu ethnic group from the central Democratic Republic of the Congo. It explores the styles of the different regions, the identification of Songye master artists, and the specificity of Kifwebe masks. The World...

Romano Guardini described Rainer Maria Rilke as the “poet who had things of such importance to say about the end of our own age [and] was also a prophet of things to come.” The complexity of Rilke is, then, “highly relevant to modern Man.” Decades after Guardini’s assessment, the reader who rediscovers Rilke will find a depth of mind and...

This innovative book reassesses the history of musicology, unearthing the field’s twentieth-century German and global roots. In the process, Anna Maria Busse Berger exposes previously unseen historical relationships such as those between the modern rediscovery of medieval music, the rise of communal singing, and the ways in which African music intersected with missionary work in the German colonial period. Ultimately,...

Provides a balanced historical narrative of the contemporary causes of conflict in the Middle East, ideal for students and scholars. The recent history of the Middle East has involved unprecedented violence and war. The Contemporary Middle East: Foreign Intervention and Authoritarian Governance Since 1979 explores the causes of the sustained turbulence in the region by focusing on three separate yet...

A comprehensive exploration, spanning 1,300 years, of the art and culture of the Sahel region of Africa This groundbreaking volume examines the extraordinary artistic and cultural traditions of the African region known as the Sahel (“shore” in Arabic), a vast area on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert that includes present-day Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, and Chad. This...

From the author of Sisters in Arms comes the incredible, untold story of Effa Manley, a black businesswoman in the male-dominated baseball industry, and, currently, the only woman inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. 1930s, New York City An ambitious Harlem woman’s husband upends her social climbing when he buys a Negro Leagues baseball team and appoints her as...

Decolonisation revolutionised the international order during the twentieth century. Yet standard histories that present the end of colonialism as an inevitable transition from a world of empires to one of nations—a world in which self-determination was synonymous with nation-building—obscure just how radical this change was. Drawing on the political thought of anticolonial intellectuals and statesmen such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, W.E.B....

The new edition of The Making of Modern South Africa provides a comprehensive, current introduction to the key themes and debates concerning the history of this controversial country. Engagingly written, the author provides a sharp, analytical overview of the new South Africa. Examines the major issues in South Africa's history, from pre-colonial to present, including colonial conquest; the establishment of...

RESIST! illuminates 500 years of anti-colonial resistance in the Global South and tells about colonial violence and oppression and its continuities. The exhibition and the book about it pay homage to the people who resisted in the most diverse ways and whose stories have hardly ever been told or heard to this day. The works of over 40 contemporary artists...

Partisans of the Nude is a survey of genre art of the nude made by artists in areas that were formerly Ottoman but not yet Arab. Though spoken of as taboo and practically absent from Arab art production, the nude genre was important for early twentieth-century artists who sought to define their societies as post-Ottoman and cosmopolitan. Although recognized as...

New research explores Muslim arts and identities in postcolonial Africa. This collection explores the dynamic place of Islamic art, architecture, and creative expression in processes of decolonisation across the African continent in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Presenting new methodologies for accentuating African agency and expression in stories about Islamic art, it is a vital new contribution to recent widespread...

From the runway in Lagos and the Afropunk festival in Johannesburg, to the "image makers" of Marrakech and the influencers of Dakar or Accra, a new generation of African fashion designers, photographers, bloggers, and artists are redefining the aesthetic contours of the continent. Audacious, humorous, disruptive, and innovative are the bywords of these young creatives who, while drawing upon and...

Two acclaimed South African artists offer a cross-generational dialogue on history, memory, and the power of self-narration. Three decades after the dismantling of apartheid began, South Africa’s so-called “born free” generation has reached adulthood, and its artists have used their work to navigate their difficult inheritance. At the same time, the historical distance between their experience and that of an...

An exploration of phrases and excerpts that inspire a major contemporary artist. Over the past several years, renowned South African artist William Kentridge has made a collection of particular phrases and sentences that have called out to him from the pages of whatever he has been reading. These phrases, which he has written into a studio notebook titled Words, have...

New York Times: 'Best Art Books' 2020 'Essential' - Sunday Times 'Brilliantly enraged' - New York Review of Books 'A real game-changer' - Economist Walk into any Western museum today and you will see the curated spoils of Empire. They sit behind plate glass: dignified, tastefully lit. Accompanying pieces of card offer a name, date, and place of origin. They...

Highlighting the strong bond between a collector and an art dealer, Shared Passion explores a remarkable collection of African art assembled in the twenty-first century. This book documents and celebrates the patience and perseverance of, and the friendship between, the Belgian collector Michel Vandenkerckhove and the Belgian art dealer and gallerist Didier Claes, and the exceptional African art collection that...

Once lauded as the wave of the African future, Zambia's economic boom in the 1960s and early 1970s was fuelled by the export of copper and other primary materials. Since the mid-1970s, however, the urban economy has rapidly deteriorated, leaving workers scrambling to get by. Expectations of Modernity explores the social and cultural responses to this prolonged period of sharp...

A panorama of the career of South African photographer David Goldblatt, elucidating his artistic commitments, networks, and influence. David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive coincides with a major traveling retrospective of the renowned South African photographer’s work. From vintage handprints of the artist’s black-and-white photography, taken between the 1950s and the 1990s, to his post-apartheid, large-format, colour work, photographs in the...

This abundantly illustrated book examines the figure of Balthazar, one of the biblical magi, and explains how and why he came to be depicted as a Black African king. According to the Gospel of Matthew, magi from the East, following a star, travelled to Jerusalem bearing precious gifts for the infant Jesus. The magi were revered as wise men and...

From Cape Town to Bristol and Richmond, statues have become sites of resistance and contestation of our imperial past and postcolonial present. The Psychic Lives of Statues by Rahul Rao offers an insightful exploration of these global controversies, demonstrating that beneath their surface lie deeper struggles over race, caste, and the politics of decolonisation. Rao takes readers on a journey...

“A stunning atlas of the present and future.” — Rebecca Solnit, author of several books including Infinite Cities: A Trilogy of Atlases—San Francisco, New Orleans, New York This immersive portal to islands around the world highlights the impacts of sea level rise and shimmers with hopeful solutions to combat it. Atlases are being redrawn as islands are disappearing. What does...

A richly illustrated account of Michael Palin's latest travel adventure. With his eightieth birthday looming, it crossed Michael Palin's mind that now might be the time to hang up his boots, to lounge about at home, to take things easy. Then the opportunity to visit Africa's most populous nation arose. A few weeks later, he was at Lagos airport, camera...

After Barbary explores the connection between the United States and North Africa between the Barbary Wars of the early nineteenth century and the era of European decolonization after World War II. Timothy Mason Roberts offers a new approach to the study of empires, highlighting the significance of Algeria in French-American relations from France's first occupation of the country through the...

Ethiopia has captured the imagination of observers since ancient times. The Ethiopians provides a fresh perspective on Ethiopian history up to 1500, beginning with the Aksumite civilisation at the start of the Common Era. It revisits famous stories like the legend of the Queen of Sheba, examines the rise and fall of Aksum, explores the role of Muslims and Islam...

A beautifully illustrated look at how the acclaimed ceramicist draws on the postcolonial experience in her work. Magdalene Odundo (b. 1950) is a Kenyan-born British ceramicist whose extraordinary works have been widely celebrated for their beauty and universality. Her studies of classical forms across many global traditions—from Greek and Chinese to Aztec and African—are evident in her intimate, evocative shapes....

One of the world's greatest revolutionary leaders, Amílcar Cabral's long and arduous campaign for the liberation of Portuguese-dominated Africa is explored in this vivid compilation of his most influential speeches and writings. Unity and Struggle is the compelling account of Amílcar Cabral’s fight against imperialism, discrimination and injustice, as well as his progressive advocacy for religious toleration and gender equality—all...

Which gods created the world according to the ancient Egyptians? How did they explain the sun's movements and its disappearance at night? In what ways did mythology permeate their lives? And what did they believe happened in the afterlife? This handy guide to Egyptian mythology explores how the ancient Nile-dwellers explained the world around them. The text delves into the...

Born in French Equatorial Africa, Andrée Blouin played a leading role in the struggles for decolonisation that shook the continent in the 1950s and 1960s. From the colonial orphanage of her childhood, she escaped an arranged marriage to become an avatar of pan-Africanism, advising heads of state from Algiers to Abidjan. Her autobiography retraces this journey. In Guinea, where Blouin...

Charting the photographic history of South Africa from colonialism to democracy, from early European photographers to work today by young South Africans, Life Itself explores how people, events and places have been depicted in photographic images over the decades. Featuring images from the heyday of Drum magazine and Black emergence to Peter Magubane's Soweto uprising pictures, David Goldblatt's In Boksburg...

The riveting tale of the 18th century slave ship voyage of The Zorg that led to the abolition of slavery. 'A horrific tale of the slave trade, destined to become a classic' — New York Times PEN Literary Award Finalist 2026 New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2025 Time's 100 Must Read Books of 2025 The New Yorker 12...

Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize, Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost is the true and haunting account of Leopold's brutal regime and its lasting effect on a ruined nation. In the late nineteenth century, when the great powers in Europe were tearing Africa apart and seizing ownership of land for themselves, King Leopold of Belgium took hold of the vast...

A stunning memoir that transforms our understanding of a generation. In my home country, they call me a 'bornfree'. Simukai Chigudu was one of the first generation to be born after the end of colonial rule in Zimbabwe. Growing up, he heard stories about his grandfather's murder by the Rhodesian regime, how his father had been imprisoned and tortured as...

Spend 24 hours with the inhabitants of the most powerful kingdom in the ancient world. Ancient Egypt wasn’t all pyramids, sphinxes and gold sarcophagi. For your average Egyptian, life was tough, and work was hard, conducted under the burning gaze of the sun god Ra. During the course of a day in the ancient city of Thebes (modern-day Luxor), Egypt’s...

From the author of the much-celebrated Lost Pianos of Siberia, comes a new critically acclaimed and Sunday Times bestselling story of a journey, this time tracing a colonial-era African expedition. 'History and travelogue combine wonderfully in this tale of colonial plunder and hubris... Roberts is such a vivid travel writer that you forget what a brilliant historian she is. She...

Violence was a constant on all colonial frontiers, from the British expansion into the Australian and African continents, to the expansion of the United States and the Napoleonic Empire’s many incursions into Europe. Yet how did the forms of violence perpetrated in these four corners of the world compare? Did the oppression and exploitation of colonised peoples constitute a new...

'The reigning Queen of Classics' - Spectator 'Mary Beard is the best in the business' - Dan Snow 'Excellent' - Guardian 'Enthralling' - Sunday Times Britain's most famous classicist asks: what are civilisations? Central to this huge question are the ways in which we have depicted the human and the divine from prehistory to the present day. Across such iconic...

Blue-veiled nomads, camels crossing infinite dunes, oases shimmering on the horizon: ready-made images of the Sahara are easy to conjure. But they can never truly capture a region that crosses eleven countries and is home to millions. This sweeping account upends old fantasies, revealing the far more interesting reality of the Earth's largest hot desert. Drawing on decades of research,...

A revelatory account of Black Atlantic political thought in the era of decolonisation, revealing how West African and Caribbean newspapers invigorated debates about imperialism, capitalism, and Black freedom. In the 1930s and 1940s, amid intensifying anticolonial activism across the British Empire, dozens of new West African and Caribbean newspapers printed their first issues. With small staffs and shoestring budgets, these...

In the nineteenth century, global systems of capitalism and empire knit the North Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds into international networks in contest over the meanings of slavery and freedom. Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves mines multinational archives to illuminate the Atlantic reverberations of US mercantile projects, "free labor" experiments, and slaveholding in western Indian Ocean societies. Gunja SenGupta and Awam...

A richly detailed transoceanic history of the early French Empire, illuminating how it became bound by a common legal culture of race—as well as how enslaved and free people critically shaped the development of the colonies. From the beginning of the seventeenth century, French colonies and trading posts sprawled across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. In the first pan-imperial history...

This study explores the relations among computerization, labour, and the arts in South Africa. There are many books about the history and discourses of computerization in the United States but relatively little about these phenomena anywhere in the Global South. In A Will for the Machine, Mark Sanders outlines South Africa's entry into the computer age in the 1960s and...

Explores how psychiatry in Ghana was never just about medicine; it was about migration, exile, and the politics of who gets to stay and who must be cast out. For centuries, mental distress in West Africa has been navigated through a mix of healing, harming, ritual, and regulation. In African Pharmakon, Nana Osei Quarshie questions conventional narratives about colonial psychiatry....

This book is an introduction to the Pharaonic war machine of New Kingdom Egypt from ca. 1575 - 1100 BC. Written by a respected Egyptologist, it concentrates on Dynasty XVIII and the Ramesside period, in which the Egyptians created a professional army and gained control of Syria, creating an "Empire of Asia." The author highlights technological developments during this period,...

A revealing account of the lives and work of Ethiopian Orthodox pilgrims in sixteenth-century Rome, examining how this African diasporic community navigated the challenges of religious pluralism in the capital of Latin Christianity. Tucked behind the apse of Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome is the ancient church of Santo Stefano. During the sixteenth century, Santo Stefano hosted an unusual community:...

What does it take to make a dictator answer for his crimes? Hissène Habré, the former despot of Chad, had terrorised, tortured, and killed on a horrific scale over eight bloody years in power—all while enjoying full American and Western support. After Habré's overthrow, his victims and their supporters were determined to see him held responsible for his atrocities. Their...

What does it take to make a dictator answer for his crimes? Hissène Habré, the former despot of Chad, had terrorised, tortured, and killed on a horrific scale over eight bloody years in power—all while enjoying full American and Western support. After Habré's overthrow, his victims and their supporters were determined to see him held responsible for his atrocities. Their...

The surprising story of how Algeria joined and then left the postwar European Economic Community and what its past inclusion means for extracontinental membership in today's European Union. On their face, the mid-1950s negotiations over European integration were aimed at securing unity in order to prevent violent conflict and boost economies emerging from the disaster of World War II. But...

The Prehistory of Egypt covers the history of the Nile Valley from Nubia to the Mediterranean, during the period from the earliest hominid settlement, around 700,000 BC, to the beginnings of dynastic Egypt at the end of the fourth millennium BC. The book focuses primarily on the fifteen millennia from 18,000 to 3,000 BC, when different cultures can be identified...

The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. A spellbinding work of history that reads like a Cold War spy thriller—about the U.S.-sanctioned plot to assassinate the democratically elected leader of the newly independent Congo. A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR—The New Yorker, The Economist, Financial Times "This is one of the best books I have read in years... gripping,...

Siollun's books are gripping - Financial Times Much is known about what Europeans did in Africa, yet very little is known about Africa's history before its colonisation. In this surprising exploration, Max Siollun uncovers societies that were not part of a backward 'Dark Continent', but which instead had rich lore to rival the ancient Greeks and Romans. Pre-colonial West Africa...

Legend has it that the end of France’s empire in sub-Saharan Africa was a peaceful affair. This book tells a very different story, exposing the shocking violence of a secret war. Its theatre was Cameroon in the 1950s and ’60s, where a mass movement for self-determination emerged under the leadership of a pro-independence party, the Union of the Peoples of...

The surprising story of the wine industry's role in the rise of French Algeria and the fall of empire. "We owe to wine a blessing far more precious than gold: the peopling of Algeria with Frenchmen," stated agriculturist Pierre Berthault in the early 1930s. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Europeans had displaced Algerians from the colony's best...

The Berbers provides a comprehensive overview of the history of the Berber-speaking peoples.

In the nineteenth century, global systems of capitalism and empire knit the North Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds into international networks in contest over the meanings of slavery and freedom. Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves mines multinational archives to illuminate the Atlantic reverberations of US mercantile projects, "free labor" experiments, and slaveholding in western Indian Ocean societies. Gunja SenGupta and Awam...

The aftermath of Algeria’s revolutionary war for independence coincided with the sexual revolution in France, and in this book, Todd Shepard argues that these two movements are inextricably linked. Sex, France, and Arab Men is a history of how and why—from the upheavals of French Algeria in 1962 through the 1970s—highly sexualised claims about Arabs were omnipresent in important public...

Rwanda by Susan Thomson offers a sobering study of the troubled African nation, both pre- and post-genocide, and its uncertain future. The brutal civil war between Hutu and Tutsi factions in Rwanda ended in 1994 when the Rwandan Patriotic Front came to power. This marked the beginning of an ambitious social, political, and economic project to remake the devastated central-east...

Winston Churchill wrote five books before he was elected to Parliament at the age of twenty-five. The most impressive of these books, The River War tells the story of Britain’s arduous and risky campaign to reconquer the Sudan at the end of the nineteenth century. More than half a century of subjection to Egypt had ended a decade earlier when...

A useful companion to the seventh volume of K. A. Kitchen’s seminal Ramesside Inscriptions Ramesside Inscriptions: Translated and Annotated Notes and Comments, Volume VII complements the seventh volume of Kitchen's seminal hieroglyphic texts (KRI VII) and its companion volume of translations (KRITA VII) that cover the period between Ramesses I and Ramesses XI. This newly published reference work contains the...

First published to mark the centenary of Nelson Mandela’s birth, The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela sparked celebrations around the globe for one of the “greatest warriors of all time” (O, The Oprah Magazine). Featuring 94 letters selected from that landmark collection, as well as six new letters that have never been published, this historic paperback provides an essential political...

"Impressive [Readers] will be rewarded with greater understanding of historical developments that changed the relationship between consumers and producers in a global economy in ways that reverberate to this day." -Wall Street Journal "Everill repositions West Africa as central to the broader Atlantic story of 18th and 19th century economic morality, its relationship with commercial ethics, and the expansion of...

"The fascinating story of arguably the greatest queen in sub-Saharan African history, who surely deserves a place in the pantheon of revolutionary world leaders." - Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Though largely unknown in the West, the seventeenth-century African queen Njinga was one of the most multifaceted rulers in history, a woman who rivalled Queen Elizabeth I in political cunning and...

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1987.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived programme, which commemorates the University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. Legitimating the Illegitimate was originally published in 1987....

Nationality is the most important legal mechanism sorting and classifying the world's population today. An individual's place of birth or naturalisation determines where he or she can and cannot be and what he or she can and cannot do. Although this system may appear universal, even natural, Will Hanley shows that it arose just a century ago. In Identifying with...

Eloquent and powerful - Françoise Vergès Debates around restitution and decolonising museums continue to rage across the world. Artefacts, effigies, and ancestral remains are finally being accurately contextualised and repatriated to their homelands. Fifteen Colonial Thefts amplifies these discussions, exploring the history of colonial violence in Africa through the prism of fifteen African belongings—all looted at the height of the...

What happens when death becomes the ultimate marker of one’s commitment to one’s freedom? What happens when the opposite of freedom is not unfreedom but death, not slavery but mortality? How are we to think of the right to life when a political demand for dignity and honour might be more important than life itself? Dying for Freedom explores these...

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived programme, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. Crown and Charter was originally published in 1974.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived programme, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. Crown and Charter was originally published in 1974.

Traditional accounts of the making of the modern world afford a place of primacy to European history. Some credit the fifteenth-century Age of Discovery and the maritime connection it established between West and East; others the accidental unearthing of the "New World." Still others point to the development of the scientific method, or the spread of Judeo-Christian beliefs; and so...

Diamonds have long been bloody. A new history shows how Germany's ruthless African empire brought diamond rings to retail display cases in America—at the cost of African lives. Since the late 1990s, activists have campaigned to remove "conflict diamonds" from jewellery shops and department stores. But if the problem of conflict diamonds—gems extracted from war zones—has only recently generated attention,...

An extraordinary work, decades in the making: the first atlas to illustrate the entire scope of the transatlantic slave trade Winner of the Association of American Publishers' 2010 R.R. Hawkins Award and PROSE Award “A monumental chronicle of this historical tragedy.” —Dwight Garner, New York Times Between 1501 and 1867, the transatlantic slave trade claimed an estimated 12.5 million Africans...

This book brings together archaeological and linguistic evidence to provide a sweeping global history of ancient Africa, tracing how the continent played an important role in the technological, agricultural, and economic transitions of world civilisation. Christopher Ehret takes readers from the close of the last Ice Age some ten thousand years ago, when a changing climate allowed for the transition...

This book brings together archaeological and linguistic evidence to provide a sweeping global history of ancient Africa, tracing how the continent played an important role in the technological, agricultural, and economic transitions of world civilisation. Christopher Ehret takes readers from the close of the last Ice Age some ten thousand years ago, when a changing climate allowed for the transition...

In this concise history of Ethiopia, Harold Marcus surveys the evolution of the oldest African nation from prehistory to the present. This study demonstrates that there is more to Ethiopia's existence than colonial logic. It shows how geography, economics, and culture have served to unite Ethiopians against fractionalization. For the updated edition, Marcus has written a new preface, two new...

Sankoré is a dynamic, interactive, mid-weight eurogame designed for one to four players, set in the 14th-century Timbuktu. The game captures the rise in fortunes of the prestigious University of Sankoré. Tasked by the emperor, Mansa Musa, with spreading knowledge throughout West Africa, players must each manage a prestigious school within the Sankoré Madrasa as this great university is raised...