Land of Tears

Land of Tears PDF

Author: Robert Harms

Publisher: Hachette UK

Published: 2019-12-03

Total Pages: 544

ISBN-13: 1541699661

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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.

African Agency and European Colonialism

African Agency and European Colonialism PDF

Author: Femi James Kolapo

Publisher: University Press of America

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780761838463

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This work provides insights into important moments in the European colonization project in Africa, and into structural intersections between the active agents of colonialism and the different layers of Africa's socio-political structures. It reveals the indispensability of the African peoples, their pre-colonial establishments, and knowledge of the colonial encounter. The book also clarifies the significant impact that African people's choices, chances, mistakes, and internal politics had in structuring their colonial experience and European dominance. Colonized Africans and colonizing Europeans had to negotiate the nature of their relationship: the grid, nexus, and hierarchy of colonial power and authority were constantly under construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction. African Agency and European Colonialism expounds upon these beclouded features of Africa's engagement of colonialism. It is appropriate for students, scholars, political analysts, sociologists, and other professionals interested in the social and political history of Africa. Book jacket.

African Perspectives on Colonialism

African Perspectives on Colonialism PDF

Author: A. Adu Boahen

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2020-10-06

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13: 1421441217

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This history deals with the twenty-year period between 1880 and 1900, when virtually all of Africa was seized and occupied by the Imperial Powers of Europe. Eurocentric points of view have dominated the study of this era, but in this book, one of Africa's leading historians reinterprets the colonial experiences from the perspective of the colonized. The Johns Hopkins Symposia in Comparative History are occasional volumes sponsored by the Department of History at the Johns Hopkins University and the Johns Hopkins University Press comprising original essays by leading scholars in the United States and other countries. Each volume considers, from a comparative perspective, an important topic of current historical interest. The present volume is the fifteenth. Its preparation has been assisted by the James S. Schouler Lecture Fund.

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa PDF

Author: Walter Rodney

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2018-11-27

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 1788731204

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The classic work of political, economic, and historical analysis, powerfully introduced by Angela Davis 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.

African History: A Very Short Introduction

African History: A Very Short Introduction PDF

Author: John Parker

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2007-03-22

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 0192802488

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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.

Why Europe Intervenes in Africa

Why Europe Intervenes in Africa PDF

Author: Catherine Gegout

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 0190845163

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Why Europe Intervenes in Africa analyses the underlying causes of all European decisions for and against military interventions in conflicts in African states since the late 1980s. It focuses on the main European actors who have deployed troops in Africa: France, the United Kingdom and the European Union. When conflict occurs in Africa, the response of European actors is generally inaction. This can be explained in several ways: the absence of strategic and economic interests, the unwillingness of European leaders to become involved in conflicts in former colonies of other European states, and sometimes the Eurocentric assumption that conflict in Africa is a normal event which does not require intervention. When European actors do decide to intervene, it is primarily for motives of security and prestige, and not primarily for economic or humanitarian reasons. The weight of past relations with Africa can also be a driver for European military intervention, but the impact of that past is changing. This book offers a theory of European intervention based mainly on realist and post-colonial approaches. It refutes the assumptions of liberals and constructivists who posit that states and organisations intervene primarily in order to respect the principle of the 'responsibility to protect'.

Problems in the History of Modern Africa

Problems in the History of Modern Africa PDF

Author: Robert O. Collins

Publisher:

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13:

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A presentation of important issues in the study of modern Africa. It addresses: decolonization and the end of Empire; democracy and the nation state; epidemics in Africa - the human and financial costs; development - failure or success; the African environment - origins of a crisis; and more.

A History of Africa

A History of Africa PDF

Author: Hosea Jaffe

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-02-15

Total Pages: 183

ISBN-13: 1783609877

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Spanning more than two thousand years of African history, from the African Iron Age to the collapse of colonialism and the beginnings of independence, Hosea Jaffe's magisterial work remains one of the few to do full justice to the continent's complex and diverse past. The great strength of Jaffe's work lies in its unique theoretical perspective, which stresses the distinctive character of Africa's social structures and historical development. Crucially, Jaffe rejects all efforts to impose Eurocentric models of history onto Africa, whether it be liberal notions of 'progress' or Marxist theories of class struggle, arguing instead that the key dynamics underpinning African history are unique to the continent itself, and rooted in conflicts between different modes of production. The work also includes a foreword by the distinguished economist and political theorist Samir Amin, in which he outlines the contribution of Jaffe's work to our understanding of African history and its ongoing post-colonial struggles.

The Acquisition of Africa (1870-1914)

The Acquisition of Africa (1870-1914) PDF

Author: Mieke van der Linden

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2016-10-05

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 9004321195

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Over recent decades, the responsibility for the past actions of the European colonial powers in relation to their former colonies has been subject to a lively debate. In this book, the question of the responsibility under international law of former colonial States is addressed. Such a legal responsibility would presuppose the violation of the international law that was applicable at the time of colonization. In the ‘Scramble for Africa’ during the Age of New Imperialism (1870-1914), European States and non-State actors mainly used cession and protectorate treaties to acquire territorial sovereignty (imperium) and property rights over land (dominium). The question is raised whether Europeans did or did not on a systematic scale breach these treaties in the context of the acquisition of territory and the expansion of empire, mainly through extending sovereignty rights and, subsequently, intervening in the internal affairs of African political entities.