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.

Contact, Conquest and Colonization brings together international historians and literary studies scholars in order to explore the force of practices of comparing in shaping empires and colonial relations at different points in time and around the globe. Whenever there was cultural contact in the context of European colonization and empire-building, historical records teem with comparisons among those cultures. This edited volume focuses on what historical agents actually do when they compare, rather than on comparison as an analytic method. Its contributors are thus interested in the ‘doing of comparison’, and explore the force of these practices of comparing in shaping empires and (post-)colonial relations between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. This book will appeal to students and scholars of global history, as well as those interested in cultural history and the history of colonialism.

The articles collected in this study, first published in 1993, concentrates on African struggles to maintain their autonomy. Although the history of interaction between African peoples and those from outside that continent is old, for most of Africa colonial domination by European powers was both relatively recent and relatively short phenomenon. In 1970 most Africans lived in independent societies; by 1915 all by two African states had been conquered by Europeans. Resistance to European domination by Africans was continuous, although the level on which is occurred varied. As the articles in this collection show, the costs of conquest to Africans was great. This title will be of interest to students of African history and Imperialism.

1870s and 1900, Africa faced European imperialist aggression, diplomatic pressures, military invasions, and eventual conquest and colonization. At the same time, African societies put up various forms of resistance against the attempt to colonize their countries and impose foreign domination. By the early twentieth century, however, much of Africa, except Ethiopia and Liberia, had been colonized by European powers. The European imperialist push into Africa was motivated by three main factors, economic, political, and social. It developed in the nineteenth century following the collapse of the profitability of the slave trade, its abolition and suppression, as well as the expansion of the European capitalist Industrial Revolution. The imperatives of capitalist industrialization-including the demand for assured sources of raw materials, the search for guaranteed markets and profitable investment outlets

This book examines how, over colonial times, the diverse practices and customs of an existing rural universe—with its many forms of livelihood—were reshaped to create a new agrarian world of settled farming. While focusing on Punjab, India, this pathbreaking analysis offers a broad argument about the workings of colonial power: the fantasy of imperialism, it says, is to make the universe afresh. Such radical change, Neeladri Bhattacharya shows, is as much conceptual as material. Agrarian colonization was a process of creating spaces that conformed to the demands of colonial rule. It entailed establishing a regime of categories—tenancies, tenures, properties, habitations—and a framework of laws that made the change possible. Agrarian colonization was in this sense a deep conquest. Colonialism, the book suggests, has the power to revisualize and reorder social relations and bonds of community. It alters the world radically, even when it seeks to preserve elements of the old. The changes it brings about are simultaneously cultural, discursive, legal, linguistic, spatial, social, and economic. Moving from intent to action, concepts to practices, legal enactments to court battles, official discourses to folklore, this book explores the conflicted and dialogic nature of a transformative process. By analyzing this great conquest, and the often silent ways in which it unfolds, the book asks every historian to rethink the practice of writing agrarian history and reflect on the larger issues of doing history.

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.

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.