This book integrates into a single framework Dahomey's pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial economic history.

A history of slavery during the 19th and 20th centuries in three former French colonies.

This is the detailed narrative of the Kat River Settlement, which was located on the border between the Cape Colony and the amaXhosa in the Eastern Cape of South Africa during the nineteenth century. The settlement created a fertile landscape in the valley and developed a political theology of great political and racial importance to the evolution of the Cape and of South Africa as a whole.

In his study of the origins of political reflection in twentieth-century African fiction, Donald Wehrs examines a neglected but important body of African texts written in colonial (English and French) and indigenous (Hausa and Yoruba) languages. He explores pioneering narrative representations of pre-colonial African history and society in seven texts: Casely Hayford's Ethiopia Unbound (1911), Alhaji Sir Abubaker Tafawa Balewa's Shaihu Umar (1934), Paul Hazoumé's Doguicimi (1938), D.O. Fagunwa's Forest of a Thousand Daemons (1938), Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954), and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958). Wehrs highlights the role of pre-colonial political economies and articulations of state power on colonial-era considerations of ethical and political issues, and is attentive to the gendered implications of texts and authorial choices. By positioning Things Fall Apart as the culmination of a tradition, rather than as its inaugural work, he also reconfigures how we think of African fiction. His book supplements recent work on the importance of indigenous contexts and discourses in situating colonial-era narratives and will inspire fresh methodological strategies for studying the continent from a multiplicity of perspectives.

This seventh volume in The Cambridge History of Africa examines the period 1905-40 in African history.

In this fascinating book, Sambit Bhattacharyya presents a detailed account of the socio-economic processes that create broad variations in living standards across the globe. The author examines the world's economic history over the last five centuries, replete with growth miracles and growth debacles: growth in Britain was steady, yet China lost her early advantage; North America settler colonies performed significantly better than those of Asia and Africa; Australia and Argentina were notably similar at the start of the twentieth century but delivered strikingly different growth outcomes. The book argues that these differences in growth rate are best explained by an interplay of factors, namely economic, political and geographical. In conclusion it presents long-run comparative growth narratives for Africa, China, India, the Americas, Russia and Western Europe. Presenting a unique and original analytical framework to explain economic growth and decline, and bridging empirical growth literature and economic history, this book will prove a stimulating read for both academic and professional economists, and scholars of economic history and economic growth. Other social scientists including sociologists, political scientists and economic historians will also find the book to be of great value.

Recent years have seen considerable growth in the media in Africa with increases in the number of newspapers and radio and television stations. At the same time there has been an increase in the number of arrests of journalists and broadcasters and various forms of censorship have been introduced. The essays in this volume examine press censorship, past and present, and bring a fresh perspective to the position of the mass media in the African continent.