Most histories seek to understand modern Africa as a troubled outcome of nineteenth century European colonialism, but that is only a small part of the story. In this celebrated book, beautifully translated from the French edition, the history of Africa in the nineteenth century unfolds from the perspective of Africans themselves rather than the European powers.It was above all a time of tremendous internal change on the African continent. Great jihads of Muslim conquest and conversion swept over West Africa. In the interior, warlords competed to control the internal slave trade. In the east, the sultanate of Zanzibar extended its reach via coastal and interior trade routes. In the north, Egypt began to modernize while Algeria was colonized. In the south, a series of forced migrations accelerated, spurred by the progression of white settlement.Through much of the century African societies assimilated and adapted to the changes generated by these diverse forces. In the end, the West's technological advantage prevailed and most of Africa fell under European control and lost its independence. Yet only by taking into account the rich complexity of this tumultuous past can we fully understand modern Africa from the colonial period to independence and the difficulties of today.

Covers the major forces at work in African society at the beginning of the 19th century until the onset of the European scramble for colonial territory in the 1880s. This study also looks at Africa's changing role in the world economy, and the effects of the abolition of the slave trade. The series is co-published in Africa with seven publishers, in the United States and Canada by the University of California Press, and in association with the UNESCO Press.

This comprehensive and detailed exploration of the African past, from prehistory to approximately 1870, is intended to provide a fully up-to-date complement to the Cambridge History of Africa. Reflecting several emphases in recent scholarship, it focusses on the changing modes of production, on gender relations and on ecology, laying particular stress on viewing 'history from below'. A distinctive theme is to be found in its analyses of cognitive history. The work falls into three sections. The first comprises a historiographic analysis, and covers the period from the dawn of prehistory to the end of the Early Iron Age. The second and third sections are, for the most part, organised on regional lines; the second section ends in the sixteenth century; the third carries the story on to 1870. A second volume, now in preparation, will cover the period from 1870 to 1995. This book attempts a more rounded view of African history than most of the other textbooks on the subject addressed to a (largely) undergraduate level student. Earlier histories have tended to ignore some of the current foci in the scholarly literature on Africa, generally not reflected in the textbooks: these include discussions of topical issues like ecology and gender. Isichei's book is also more radical.

In a vast and all-embracing study of Africa, from the origins of mankind to the South African general election of 1994, John Iliffe refocuses African history on the peopling of an environmentally hostile continent. Africans have been pioneers struggling against disease and nature, and their social, economic and political institutions have been designed to ensure survival and maximise numbers. These institutions enabled them to survive the slave trade and colonial invasion, but in the context of medical progress and other twentieth-century innovations the same institutions have bred the most rapid population growth the world has ever seen. This demographic growth has lain behind the collapse of colonial rule, the disintegration of Apartheid, and the instability of contemporary nations. The history of the continent is thus a single story binding living Africans to their earliest human ancestors.

AFRICAN HISTORY. History of Modern Africa recounts the full breadth of the last two centuries of African history. Author Richard Reid takes us on a thought-provoking and illuminating journey through the slave trade and colonization to the rise of Islam, struggles for independence, and beyond. Readers will see how Africa's rich diversity began to re-emerge during the post-colonial era - and discover the contrasting periods of despair and hope that emerged with it. History of Modern Africa is an essential recounting of the turning points of Africa's past and the myriad strands of African culture that will shape its future.

Born into a Xhosa royal family around 1792 in South Africa, Jan Tzatzoe was destined to live in an era of profound change—one that witnessed the arrival and entrenchment of European colonialism. As a missionary, chief, and cultural intermediary on the eastern Cape frontier and in Cape Town and a traveler in Great Britain, Tzatzoe helped foster the merging of African and European worlds into a new South African reality. Yet, by the 1860s, despite his determined resistance, he was an oppressed subject of harsh British colonial rule. In this innovative, richly researched, and splendidly written biography, Roger S. Levine reclaims Tzatzoe's lost story and analyzes his contributions to, and experiences with, the turbulent colonial world to argue for the crucial role of Africans as agents of cultural and intellectual change.