Based mainly on oral evidence and soldiers' letters, tells the story of over half-a-million African troops who served with the British Army in campaigns in the Horn of Africa, the Middle East, Italy, and Burma. Looks at the impact of army life and travel on the men and their families, and the role of ex-servicemen in post-war nationalist politics.

Taifa is a story of African intellectual agency, but it is also an account of how nation and race emerged out of the legal, social, and economic histories in one major city, Dar es Salaam. Nation and race—both translatable as taifa in Swahili—were not simply universal ideas brought to Africa by European colonizers, as previous studies assume. They were instead categories crafted by local African thinkers to make sense of deep inequalities, particularly those between local Africans and Indian immigrants. Taifa shows how nation and race became the key political categories to guide colonial and postcolonial life in this African city. Using deeply researched archival and oral evidence, Taifa transforms our understanding of urban history and shows how concerns about access to credit and housing became intertwined with changing conceptions of nation and nationhood. Taifa gives equal attention to both Indians and Africans; in doing so, it demonstrates the significance of political and economic connections between coastal East Africa and India during the era of British colonialism, and illustrates how the project of racial nationalism largely severed these connections by the 1970s.

"West African Soldiers in Britain's Colonial Army, 1860-1960 explores the history of Britain's West African colonial army based in Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone and the Gambia placing it within a broader social context and emphasizing, as far as possible, the experience of the ordinary soldier. The aim is not to describe the many battles and campaigns fought by this force but to look at the development of the West African colonial army as an institution over the course of about a century. In pursuing this goal, it is sometimes useful to employ the lens of military culture defined differently by scholars but essentially meaning a set of shared ideas and behaviors that inform daily life in the military. While other locally recruited colonial militaries in Africa have attracted considerable attention from historians as they served as an essential pillar supporting European rule, this book represents the first comprehensive scholarly study of Britain's West African army which was the largest such British-led force south of the Sahara. The study is based on extensive archival research conducted in nine archives located in five countries"--

The second volume explains how the League of Nations mandates system fused two of the predominant and compelling global forces of the twentieth century: imperialism and Wilsonian internationalism. After the First World War, Britain and France administered most of Germany's former tropical African colonies as "mandates" under the supervision of the League as "a sacred trust of civilization." This system of international trusteeship changed British and French rule in Africa. In short, "mandates" were not "colonies." Mandates meant less militarism, more commercial equality, a greater emphasis on the interests of Africans, and an end to the extension of European national sovereignty over colonized peoples. Accountability to the League also required the British and French to reconsider traditional economic, strategic, and ideological assumptions about their empires. In the process, the "sacred trust" sowed the seeds of self-doubt about the very purpose and future of European imperialism. The mandates system continued to represent a genuine internationalisation and reformation of colonialism and had long-term economic, political, and cultural consequences for Africans and Europeans within the mandated territories. Despite the Depression, repeated Anglo-French foreign policy failures, growing humiliations for Geneva, and war in Africa and Europe, the principles and practices of international trusteeship proved persistent. Mandates demonstrated the relevance of international law, the importance of the League of Nations, and the impact of Wilsonian principles on international relations and European imperialism.

Blending African social history with US foreign relations, John V. Clune documents how ordinary people experienced a major aspect of Cold War diplomacy. The book describes how military-sponsored international travel, especially military training abroad and United Nations peacekeeping deployments in the Sinai and Lebanon, altered Ghanaian service members and their families during the three decades after independence in 1957. Military assistance to Ghana included sponsoring training and education in the United States, and American policymakers imagined that national modernization would result from the personal relationships Ghanaian service members and their families would forge. As an act of faith, American military assistance policy with Ghana remained remarkably consistent despite little evidence that military education and training in the United States produced any measurable results. Merging newly discovered documents from Ghana's armed forces and declassified sources on American military assistance to Africa, this work argues that military-sponsored travel made individual Ghanaians' outlooks on the world more international, just as military assistance planners hoped they would, but the Ghanaian state struggled to turn that new identity into political or economic progress.

Drawing on case studies mostly from Asia and Africa, this book reconsiders the increasing interconnectedness between world regions from a perspective of translocality . It suggests a more comprehensive reading of processes often simplified as global, very recent, unidirectional, and Western -dominated.