Along with Africa, Volume 1 and Volume 2, Volume 3: Colonial Africa, 1885-1939 adopts a new perspective on African history and culture, surveying the wide array of societies and states that have existed on the African continent and introducing readers to the diversity of African experiences and cultural expressions. Toyin Falola has brought together African studies professors from a variety of schools and settings. Writing from their individual areas of expertise, these authors work together to break general stereotypes about Africa, focusing instead on the substantive issues of the African past from an African perspective. Volume 1, African History Before 1885, introduces students to the various precolonial histories of Africa. Volume 2, African Cultures and Societies Before 1885, provides a broad view of precolonial experiences and expressions in Africa. Volume 3, Colonial Africa, 1885-1939, details the experiences and ramifications of the colonization process throughout the African continent. Many different aspects are discussed including the changes in political and economic systems, and impacts on education, religion, and the environment. Also included are detailed regional histories of various geographical areas. The texts are richly illustrated and include maps to make cultural and historical movements clearer, as well as suggestions for further reading that will help readers broaden their own particular interests. Africa provides new perspectives that challenge the accepted ways of studying Africa, flexibility for instructors to structure courses, and encouragement for readers who are eager to learn about the diversity of the African experience.

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.

How colonial governments in Asia and Africa financed their activities and why fiscal systems varied across colonies reveals the nature and long-term effects of colonial rule.

In Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa, Catherine Higgs traces the early-twentieth-century journey of the Englishman Joseph Burtt to the Portuguese colony of São Tomé and Príncipe—the chocolate islands—through Angola and Mozambique, and finally to British Southern Africa. Burtt had been hired by the chocolate firm Cadbury Brothers Limited to determine if the cocoa it was buying from the islands had been harvested by slave laborers forcibly recruited from Angola, an allegation that became one of the grand scandals of the early colonial era. Burtt spent six months on São Tomé and Príncipe and a year in Angola. His five-month march across Angola in 1906 took him from innocence and credulity to outrage and activism and ultimately helped change labor recruiting practices in colonial Africa. This beautifully written and engaging travel narrative draws on collections in Portugal, the United Kingdom, and Africa to explore British and Portuguese attitudes toward work, slavery, race, and imperialism. In a story still familiar a century after Burtt’s sojourn, Chocolate Islands reveals the idealism, naivety, and racism that shaped attitudes toward Africa, even among those who sought to improve the conditions of its workers.