This study assesses the significance of the hunting cult as a major element of the imperial experience in Africa and Asia. Through a study of the game laws and the beginnings of conservation in the 19th and early-20th centuries, the author demonstrates the racial inequalities which existed between Europeans and indigenous hunters. Africans were denied access to game, and the development of game reserves and national parks accelerated this process. Indigenous hunters in Africa and India were turned into "poachers" and only Europeans were permitted to hunt. In India, the hunting of animals became the chief recreation of military officers and civilian officials, a source of display and symbolic dominance of the environment. Imperial hunting fed the natural history craze of the day, and many hunters collected trophies and specimens for private and public collections as well as contributing to hunting literature. Adopting a radical approach to issues of conservation, this book links the hunting cult in Africa and India to the development of conservation, and consolidates widely-scattered material on the importance of hunting to the economics and nutrition of African societies.

Focusing on the history of the Ingutsheni Lunatic Asylum (renamed a mental hospital after 1933), situated near Bulawayo in the former Southern Rhodesia, Surfacing Up explores the social, cultural, and political history of the colony that became Zimbabwe after gaining its independence in 1980. The phrase "surfacing up" was drawn from a conversation Lynette A. Jackson had with a psychiatric nurse who used the concept to explain what brought African potential patients into the psychiatric system. Jackson uses Ingutsheni as a reference point for the struggle to "domesticate" Africa and its citizens after conquest. Drawing on the work of Frantz Fanon, Jackson maintains that the asylum in Southern Rhodesia played a significant role in maintaining the colonial social order. She supports Fanon's claim that colonial psychiatric hospitals were repositories for those of "indocile nature" or for those who failed to fit "the social background of the colonial type." Through reconstruction and reinterpretation of patient narratives, Jackson shows how patients were diagnosed, detained, and deemed recovered. She draws on psychiatric case files to analyze the changing economic, social, and environmental conditions of the colonized, the varying needs of the white settlers, and the shifting boundaries between these two communities. She seeks to extend and enrich our understanding of how a significant institution changed the way citizens and subjects experienced the colonial social order.