Published by De Gruyter Oldenbourg

Africa in Global History

Edited by: Joel Glasman, Omar Gueye, Alexander Keese and Christine Whyte

ISSN: 2628-1767

e-ISSN 2628-1775

Overview
Volumes

The ‘global’ turn in historical research has yet to fully incorporate the African continent. This series aims to promote historical scholarship which addresses the global connections which shaped African histories; theories and methods of doing Africanist global history; and studies of the limitations of global history from an Africanist perspective.

Africa in Global History welcomes (but is not limited to) monographs and edited volumes which tackle the themes of intervention and development, migration and colonial inter-connections, and trade and labour. Throughout much of modern African history, actors have been focused on visions of African futures. In these visions, supposedly ‘traditional’, ‘backward’ or ‘under-developed’ societies would be replaced. This book series addresses this long history of interventions into African societies from both internal and external groups. The series will trace changing patterns of migration, often associated with the establishment of new settlements and colonies, or changing trade or labour relations. By taking a comparative approach, the series will also intervene into the pressing debates on nationalism, nationalist sentiment and xenophobia (in all its complications); tradition and neo-traditionalism; and the historical processes which shaped Africa’s place in the world.

The books in this series will both address the particular, regional manifestations of this phenomenon, disaggregating the monolithic notion of ‘Africa in the World’, but also examine ways that ‘Africa as a country’ has been created through discourses of civilisation, improvement and development.

We particularly encourage submissions from Africa-based scholars, and we are committed to exploring innovative new methods to support publication. One of the objectives of this series would be to support African scholars to create new research collaborations and publish their research.

Advisory Board:

Patrick Manning, Conceição Neto, Toyin Falola, Scholastique Diazinga, Babacar Fall, Isabella Kentridge, William Gervase Clarence-Smith ,Felicitas Becker, Emma Hunter, Matt Graham, Erin Jessee, Joe Alie, Ibrahim Sundiata, Lynda Day, Colleen Kriger, Kristin Mann, Lorelle Semley, Vanessa S. Oliveira, Andreas Eckert

Topics

Book Open Access 2023

The Winds of History

Life in a Corner of Rural Africa Since the 19th Century

Andreas Zeman, Schweizerischer Nationalfonds (SNF)

Volume 7 in this series

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Based on extensive archival research in six countries and intensive fieldwork, the book analyses the history of the village of Nkholongue on the eastern shore of Lake Malawi from the time of its formation in the 19^th century to the present day. The study uses Nkholongue as micro-historical lens to examine a wide variety of topics as diverse as the slave trade, the spread of Islam, colonization, subsistence production, counter-insurgency, decolonization, civil war, eco-tourism, and matriliny. Thereby, the book seeks to consequently reflect on the generalizability and (global) comparability of local findings by framing analyses in historiographical discussions that go beyond the regional or national level. Although the chapters of the book deal with very different topics and can also stand on their own, they are united by a common interest in the history of rural Africa in the longue durée. Contrary to persistent clichés of rural inertia in Africa, the book as a whole underscores the profound changeability of social conditions and relations in Nkholongue over the years, highlighting the frequent and often violent ruptures brought to the village from outside.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.0000/9783110765007
ISBN:: 9783110765007
ISBN:: 9783110765052
ISBN:: 9783110764826
Subject:: History
Subject:: Historical Periods
Subject:: Modern History
Subject:: Regional and National History
Subject:: Africa
Subject:: Topics in History
Subject:: Colonial and Postcolonial History
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book Open Access 2023

Ordinary Sudan, 1504–2019

From Social History to Politics from Below Part 1 | Part 2

Elena Vezzadini, Iris Seri-Hersch, Lucie Revilla, Anaël Poussier, Mahassin Abdul Jalil

Volume 6 in this series

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This book project begins from the assumption that the study of "exceptionally normal" men and women has radical implications for the understanding of Sudanese politics and history. Against a historiography enchanted by elite actors and international agents, this book examines how ordinary people have induced the most important political shifts in the history of the country, including the last 2019 Revolution; but also how they have participated to the construction of consensus that regimes needed to survive. The two volumes of the book follow an organization according to discipline: the first is mostly on social history and the second on ‘politics from below’.

Volume 1:

Towards a new social history of Sudan

Edited by: Mahassin Abd al-Jaliil, Iris Seri-Hersch, Anael Poussier, Elena Vezzadini

In the historiography of Sudan, there is a notorious scarcity of works on social history, and all the more on the history of gender and women (which is surprising if one thinks at the exceptional importance of the women movement in Sudan, past and present). The field is dominated by political history, or by an institutional colonial history with no actors inside. It is as if the scholarship had missed the radical impact of social history, be it in its Marxist or French culturalist understanding, in re-envisioning the question of agency in history. With its original and unpublished research on women history, micro-history and subaltern history, this volume hopes to be an important addition to the scholarship on Sudan Studies, and more generally to African and Middle Eastern studies.

Volume 2

Power from below: ordinary doing and undoing of the establishment

Edited by: Mahassin Abd al-Jalil, Lucie Revilla, Elena Vezzadini

In a similar way, the second volume wishes to explore the role of ordinary people in the making and unmaking of the various Sudanese regimes, and in particular of the Ingaz (1989-2019). If much attention in Sudan Studies has been given to the role of civil war and the peripheries in bringing about change, there are very few studies that focus on ordinary people and everyday routines where politics is made and unmade (marriages celebrations, the meaning of police ethos in a context of authoritarianism, or the role of women in the last regime). Thus, this volume aims to contribute to a political anthropology of consensus in violent regimes, something that in the case of European history has been well studied, but it is almost absent in African studies, where ordinary citizens are seen as powerless.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.0000/9783110719611
ISBN:: 9783110719611
ISBN:: 9783110719642
ISBN:: 9783110719505
Subject:: History
Subject:: Regional and National History
Subject:: Africa
Subject:: Topics in History
Subject:: Social History
Subject:: Global History
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book Open Access 2021

The Lumumba Generation

African Bourgeoisie and Colonial Distinction in the Belgian Congo

Daniel Tödt, Alex Skinner, Humboldt-Universität Berlin

Volume 5 in this series

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How and why did the Congolese elite turn from loyal intermediaries into opponents of the colonial state? This book seeks to enrich our understanding of the political and cultural processes culminating in the tumultuous decolonization of the Belgian Congo. Focusing on the making of an African bourgeoisie, the book illuminates the so-called évolués’ social worlds, cultural self-representations, daily life and political struggles.

https://youtu.be/c8ybPCi80dc

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110709308
ISBN:: 9783110709308
ISBN:: 9783110709377
ISBN:: 9783110708691
Subject:: History
Subject:: Regional and National History
Subject:: Africa
Subject:: Topics in History
Subject:: Global History
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2021

Outsourcing African Labor

Kru Migratory Workers in Global Ports, Estates and Battlefields until the End of the 19th Century

Jeffrey Gunn

Volume 4 in this series

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By the late eighteenth century, the ever-increasing British need for local labour in West Africa based on malarial, climatic, and manpower concerns led to a willingness of the British and Kru (West African labourers from Liberia) to experiment with free wage labour contracts. The Kru’s familiarity with European trade on the Kru Coast (modern Liberia) from at least the sixteenth century played a fundamental role in their decision to expand their wage earning opportunities under contract with the British. The establishment of Freetown in 1792 enabled the Kru to engage in systematized work for British merchants, ship captains, and naval officers. Kru workers increased their migration to Freetown establishing what appears to be their first permanent labouring community beyond their homeland on the Kru Coast. Their community in Freetown known as Krutown provided a readily available labour pool and ensured their regular employment on board British commercial ships and Royal Navy vessels circumnavigating the Atlantic and beyond. In the process, the Kru established a network of Krutowns and community settlements in many Atlantic ports including Cape Coast, Fernando Po, Ascension Island, Cape of Good Hope, and in the British Caribbean in Demerara and Port of Spain.

Outsourcing African Labour in the Nineteenth Century: Kru Migratory Workers in Global Ports, Estates and Battlefields structures the fragmented history of Kru workers into a coherent global framework. The migration of Kru workers in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans, in commercial and military contexts represents a movement of free wage labour that transformed the Kru Coast into a homeland that nurtured diasporas and staffed a vast network of workplaces. As the Kru formed permanent and transient working communities around the Atlantic and in the British Caribbean, they underwent several phases of social, political, and economic innovation, which ultimately overcame a decline in employment in their homeland on the Kru Coast by the end of the nineteenth century by increasing employment in their diaspora.

There were unique features of the Kru migrant labour force that characterized all phases of its expansion. The migration was virtually entirely male, and at a time when slavery was widespread and the slave trade was subjected to the abolition campaign of the British Navy, Kru workers were free with an expertise in manning seaborne craft and porterage. Kru carried letters from previous captains as testimonies of their reliability and work ethic or they worked under the supervision of experienced workers who effectively served as references for employment. They worked for contractual periods of between six months and five years for which they were paid wages. The Kru thereby stand out as an anomaly in the history of Atlantic trade when compared with the much larger diasporas of enslaved Africans.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110680331
ISBN:: 9783110680331
ISBN:: 9783111258980
ISBN:: 9783110680225
ISBN:: 9783110680416
Subject:: History
Subject:: Historical Periods
Subject:: Modern History
Subject:: Regional and National History
Subject:: Africa
Subject:: Topics in History
Subject:: Labour History
Publisher:: De Gruyter Oldenbourg

Book Open Access 2021

Colonial Impotence

Virtue and Violence in a Congolese Concession (1911–1940)

Benoît Henriet

Volume 3 in this series

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In Colonial Impotence, Benoît Henriet studies the violent contradictions of colonial rule from the standpoint of the Leverville concession, Belgian Congo’s largest palm oil exploitation. Leverville was imagined as a benevolent tropical utopia, whose Congolese workers would be "civilized" through a paternalist machinery. However, the concession was marred by inefficiency, endemic corruption and intrinsic brutality. Colonial agents in the field could be seen as impotent, for they were both unable and unwilling to perform as expected. This book offers a new take on the joint experience of colonialism and capitalism in Southwest Congo, and sheds light on their impact on local environments, bodies, societies and cosmogonies.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110652734
ISBN:: 9783110652734
ISBN:: 9783111257433
ISBN:: 9783110649093
ISBN:: 9783110648782
Subject:: History
Subject:: Historical Periods
Subject:: Modern History
Subject:: Regional and National History
Subject:: Africa
Publisher:: De Gruyter Oldenbourg

Book Open Access 2021

Navigating Socialist Encounters

Moorings and (Dis)Entanglements between Africa and East Germany during the Cold War

Eric Burton, Anne Dietrich, Immanuel R. Harisch, Marcia C. Schenck

Volume 2 in this series

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This edited volume firmly places African history into global history by highlighting connections between African and East German actors and institutions during the Cold War. With a special focus on negotiations and African influences on East Germany (and vice versa), the volume sheds light on personal and institutional agency, cultural cross-fertilization, migration, development, and solidarity.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110623543
ISBN:: 9783110623543
ISBN:: 9783111087894
ISBN:: 9783110623826
ISBN:: 9783110622317
Subject:: History
Subject:: Historical Periods
Subject:: Contemporary History since 1945
Subject:: Cold War
Subject:: Regional and National History
Subject:: Africa
Publisher:: De Gruyter Oldenbourg

Book Open Access 2020

Developing Heritage – Developing Countries

Ethiopian Nation-Building and the Origins of UNESCO World Heritage, 1960–1980

Marie Huber, Humboldt-Universität Berlin, Gerda Henkel Stiftung

Volume 1 in this series

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The history of development has paid only little attention to cultural projects. This book looks at the development politics that shaped the UNESCO World Heritage programme, with a case study of Ethiopian World Heritage sites from the 1960s to the 1980s. In a large-scale conservation and tourism planning project, selected sites were set up and promoted as images of the Ethiopian nation. This story serves to illustrate UNESCO’s role in constructing a “useful past” in many African countries engaged in the process of nation-building. UNESCO experts and Ethiopian elites had a shared interest in producing a portfolio of antiquities and national parks to underwrite Ethiopia’s imperial claims to regional hegemony with ancient history. The key findings of this book highlight a continuity in Ethiopian history, despite the political ruptures caused by the 1974 revolution and UNESCO’s transformation from knowledge producer to actual provider of development policies. The particular focus on the bureaucratic and political practices of heritage, bridges a gap between cultural heritage studies and the history of international organisations. The result is a first study of the global discourse on heritage as it emerged in the 1960s development decade.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110681017
ISBN:: 9783110681017
ISBN:: 9783110681093
ISBN:: 9783110680232
Subject:: History
Subject:: Historical Periods
Subject:: Contemporary History since 1945
Subject:: Other Topics
Subject:: Regional and National History
Subject:: Africa
Publisher:: De Gruyter Oldenbourg