Download or read book Africa and the West A Documentary History written by William H. Worger and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-02 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Africa and the West presents a fascinating array of primary sources to engage readers in the history of Africa's long and troubled relationship with the West. Many of the sources have not previously appeared in print, or in books readily available to students. Volume 1 covers two major topics: the Atlantic slave trade and the European conquest. It details the beginnings of the slave trade, slavery as a business, the experiences of slaves, and the effect of abolitionism on the trade, using such documents as a letter from a sixteenth-century African king to the king of Portugal calling for a more regulated slave trade, and the nineteenth-century testimony of a South African slave accused of treason. The volume also covers the early nineteenth-century considerations of the costs and benefits of colonization, the development of conquest as the century progressed, with special attention to technology, legislation, empire, religion, racism, and violence, through such unusual documents as Cecil Rhodes's will and a chart of the costs of African animals exported to Western zoos.
Download or read book A Fistful of Shells written by Toby Green and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-03-21 with total page 651 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the time the “Scramble for Africa” among European colonial powers began in the late nineteenth century, Africa had already been globally connected for centuries. Its gold had fueled the economies of Europe and the Islamic world for nearly a millennium, and the sophisticated kingdoms spanning its west coast had traded with Europeans since the fifteenth century. Until at least 1650, this was a trade of equals, using a variety of currencies—most importantly, cowrie shells imported from the Maldives and nzimbu shells imported from Brazil. But, as the slave trade grew, African kingdoms began to lose prominence in the growing global economy. We have been living with the effects of this shift ever since. With A Fistful of Shells, Toby Green transforms our view of West and West-Central Africa by reconstructing the world of these kingdoms, which revolved around trade, diplomacy, complex religious beliefs, and the production of art. Green shows how the slave trade led to economic disparities that caused African kingdoms to lose relative political and economic power. The concentration of money in the hands of Atlantic elites in and outside these kingdoms brought about a revolutionary nineteenth century in Africa, parallel to the upheavals then taking place in Europe and America. Yet political fragmentation following the fall of African aristocracies produced radically different results as European colonization took hold. Drawing not just on written histories, but on archival research in nine countries, art, oral history, archaeology, and letters, Green lays bare the transformations that have shaped world politics and the global economy since the fifteenth century and paints a new and masterful portrait of West Africa, past and present.
Download or read book History of West Africa written by K. B. C. Onwubiko and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book An Economic History of West Africa written by A. G. Hopkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-09-19 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the standard account of the economic history of the vast area conventionally known as West Africa. Ranging from prehistoric time to independence it covers the former French as well as British colonies.
Download or read book Themes in West Africa s History written by Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2006-01-15 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There has long been a need for a new textbook on West Africa’s history. In Themes in West Africa’s History, editor Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong and his contributors meet this need, examining key themes in West Africa’s prehistory to the present through the lenses of their different disciplines. The contents of the book comprise an introduction and thirteen chapters divided into three parts. Each chapter provides an overview of existing literature on major topics, as well as a short list of recommended reading, and breaks new ground through the incorporation of original research. The first part of the book examines paths to a West African past, including perspectives from archaeology, ecology and culture, linguistics, and oral traditions. Part two probes environment, society, and agency and historical change through essays on the slave trade, social inequality, religious interaction, poverty, disease, and urbanization. Part three sheds light on contemporary West Africa in exploring how economic and political developments have shaped religious expression and identity in significant ways. Themes in West Africa’s History represents a range of intellectual views and interpretations from leading scholars on West Africa’s history. It will appeal to college undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars in the way it draws on different disciplines and expertise to bring together key themes in West Africa’s history, from prehistory to the present.
Download or read book The Red Book of West Africa written by and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1920, this resource was intended as a guide to the history and activities of a variety of commercial enterprises in the British West African colonies. It also reveals the characters and backgrounds of personalities in government, business and the professions.
Download or read book Slave Owners of West Africa written by Sandra E. Greene and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-22 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking book, Sandra E. Greene explores the lives of three prominent West African slave owners during the age of abolition. These first-published biographies reveal personal and political accomplishments and concerns, economic interests, religious beliefs, and responses to colonial rule in an attempt to understand why the subjects reacted to the demise of slavery as they did. Greene emphasizes the notion that the decisions made by these individuals were deeply influenced by their personalities, desires to protect their economic and social status, and their insecurities and sympathies for wives, friends, and other associates. Knowing why these individuals and so many others in West Africa made the decisions they did, Greene contends, is critical to understanding how and why the institution of indigenous slavery continues to influence social relations in West Africa to this day.
Download or read book Power and Landscape in Atlantic West Africa written by J. Cameron Monroe and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-02-13 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This volume applies insights drawn from the theories and methods of landscape archaeology to contribute to our understanding of the nature if West African societies in the Atlantic Era (17th-19th Centuries AD). The authors adopt a briad set of methods and approaches to tackle how the nature and structures of African political and social relations changed across regions in this period. This is only the second volume in a decade to focus on the archeology of this period in West Africa, and the first volume in sub-Saharan Africanist archeology to be focused in the recent past in oue sub-region of the continent from a coherent methodological and theoretical standpoint"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book West Africa written by Eugene L. Mendonsa and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 668 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This introductory book covers West Africa's history, social organization, and contemporary setting. It analyzes the many present-day problems facing West Africans such as the lack of development, dependency on economic relations with wealthy countries, poor governance, interference by the military in civilian affairs, corruption, and the lack of functioning democratic governments. This book also shows how West African indigenous civilization developed its humanitarian, democratic, and communalistic nature. Traditional political processes and ancestral customs are put forth as ways of solving West Africa's modern problems. Divided into three main parts: "The Setting and Social Organization," "The History of West Africa," and "The Modern Era," the main objective of this textbook is to teach students about the depth of African civilization and how its principles can be used to address modern-day problems in West Africa. Mendonsa expresses the opinion that in order to solve current problems plaguing the region, a knowledge of history, African culture, and ancient African beliefs is crucial. The Teacher's Manual includes chapter outlines and summaries, key points, sample questions, and suggested films and websites.
Download or read book The Portuguese in West Africa 1415 1670 written by Malyn Newitt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-28 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Portuguese in West Africa, 1415–1670 brings together a collection of documents - all in new English translation - that illustrate aspects of the encounters between the Portuguese and the peoples of North and West Africa in the period from 1400 to 1650. This period witnessed the diaspora of the Sephardic Jews, the emigration of Portuguese to West Africa and the islands, and the beginnings of the black diaspora associated with the slave trade. The documents show how the Portuguese tried to understand the societies with which they came into contact and to reconcile their experience with the myths and legends inherited from classical and medieval learning. They also show how Africans reacted to the coming of Europeans, adapting Christian ideas to local beliefs and making use of exotic imports and European technologies. The documents also describe the evolution of the black Portuguese communities in Guinea and the islands, as well as the slave trade and the way that it was organized, understood, and justified.
Download or read book Remotely Global written by Charles Piot and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-11-26 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At first glance, the remote villages of the Kabre people of northern Togo appear to have all the trappings of a classic "out of the way" African culture—subsistence farming, straw-roofed houses, and rituals to the spirits and ancestors. Arguing that village life is in fact an effect of the modern and the global, Charles Piot suggests that Kabre culture is shaped as much by colonial and postcolonial history as by anything "indigenous" or local. Through analyses of everyday and ceremonial social practices, Piot illustrates the intertwining of modernity with tradition and of the local with the national and global. In a striking example of the appropriation of tradition by the state, Togo's Kabre president regularly flies to the region in his helicopter to witness male initiation ceremonies. Confounding both anthropological theorizations and the State Department's stereotyped images of African village life, Remotely Global aims to rethink Euroamerican theories that fail to come to terms with the fluidity of everyday relations in a society where persons and things are forever in motion.
Download or read book Back to Africa written by Richard West and published by New York : Holt, Rinehart and Winston. This book was released on 1970 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Atlantic Slave Trade from West Central Africa 1780 1867 written by Daniel B. Domingues da Silva and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-26 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the inland origins of slaves leaving West Central Africa at the peak period of the transatlantic slave trade.
Download or read book African Dominion written by Michael A. Gomez and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking history that puts early and medieval West Africa in a global context Pick up almost any book on early and medieval world history and empire, and where do you find West Africa? On the periphery. This pioneering book, the first on this period of the region’s history in a generation, tells a different story. Interweaving political and social history and drawing on a rich array of sources, including Arabic manuscripts, oral histories, and recent archaeological findings, Michael Gomez unveils a new vision of how categories of ethnicity, race, gender, and caste emerged in Africa and in global history more generally. Scholars have long held that such distinctions arose during the colonial period, but Gomez shows they developed much earlier. Focusing on the Savannah and Sahel region, Gomez traces the exchange of ideas and influences with North Africa and the Central Islamic Lands by way of merchants, scholars, and pilgrims. Islam’s growth in West Africa, in tandem with intensifying commerce that included slaves, resulted in a series of political experiments unique to the region, culminating in the rise of empire. A major preoccupation was the question of who could be legally enslaved, which together with other factors led to the construction of new ideas about ethnicity, race, gender, and caste—long before colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. Telling a radically new story about early Africa in global history, African Dominion is set to be the standard work on the subject for many years to come.
Download or read book A History of Race in Muslim West Africa 1600 1960 written by Bruce S. Hall and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-06 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The mobilization of local ideas about racial difference has been important in generating, and intensifying, civil wars that have occurred since the end of colonial rule in all of the countries that straddle the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. From Sudan to Mauritania, the racial categories deployed in contemporary conflicts often hearken back to an older history in which blackness could be equated with slavery and non-blackness with predatory and uncivilized banditry. This book traces the development of arguments about race over a period of more than 350 years in one important place along the southern edge of the Sahara Desert: the Niger Bend in northern Mali. Using Arabic documents held in Timbuktu, as well as local colonial sources in French and oral interviews, Bruce S. Hall reconstructs an African intellectual history of race that long predated colonial conquest, and which has continued to orient inter-African relations ever since.
Download or read book Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West written by Robin Horton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-07-13 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robin Horton's critical and creative writings on African religious thought have influenced anthropologists, philosophers, and all those interested in the comparative study of religion and thought. This selection of some of his classic papers, with a new introduction and postscript by the author, traces Horton's theoretical ideas over thirty years. In attempting to understand African religious thought, he also tackles broader issues in the history and sociology of thought, such as secularisation and modernisation. Part I is a critical assessment of two established interpretive approaches, the Symbolist and the Theological. Part II proposes an alternative 'Intellectualist' approach that emphasises the structural and processual similarities between religious and scientific thinking. The postscript appraises the Intellectualist approach in the light of theorising about religion and world views.
Download or read book Medieval West Africa written by Nehemia Levtzion and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the 9th to the 15th century Arab travellers and observers produced a rich literature in West Africa. An annotated translation of this body of work is found in ""Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History"". This title is a simplified form of this corpus for students.
