At the age of thirty-three, Ekow Eshun—born in London to African-born parents—travels to Ghana in search of his roots. He goes from Accra, Ghana’s cosmopolitan capital city, to the storied slave forts of Elmina, and on to the historic warrior kingdom of Asante. During his journey, Eshun uncovers a long-held secret about his lineage that will compel him to question everything he knows about himself and where he comes from. From the London suburbs of his childhood to the twenty-first century African metropolis, Eshun’s is a moving chronicle of one man’s search for home, and of the pleasures and pitfalls of fashioning an identity in these vibrant contemporary worlds.

Nigeria is the sixth largest producer of oil in the world and one of the major suppliers of oil to the US. Set against a backdrop of what has been called the scramble for African oil, this text documents the consequences of a half-century of oil exploitation and production in one of the world's foremost centres of biodiversity.

The book explores the evolving economics of gold as a global commodity as well as the production and trade of gold in and from the African continent. The growth of gold as an increasingly important and diverse source of African wealth is examined, alongside the impact that the rise of China in the 21st century has had on the demand for gold. The volatility of the gold price has increased as a result of the dramatic decline of gold demand for manufacturing purposes. Gold is Africa’s second largest export after oil and is a perfect metaphor for a continent rich in resources while so much of its population lives in such dire poverty. The artisanal and small scale gold mining (ASGM) sector, is surprisingly widely perceived as being beneficial to the development of Africa despite its exploitation and dreadful health and environmental consequences. African Gold: Production, Trade and Economic Development considers policy issues regarding the gold mining sector, the economics of beneficiation, the retreat of jewelry manufacturing across the continent as well as ‘Africa’s golden future’. It is a relevant book for both academics and policymakers interested in Africa, natural resource, and development economics.

Issued in conjunction with the exhibition Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time, held January 26, 2019-July 21, 2019, Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois.

Kirkuk is Iraq's most multilingual city, for millennia home to a diverse population. It was also where, in 1927, a foreign company first struck oil in Iraq. Over the following decades, Kirkuk became the heart of Iraq's booming petroleum industry. City of Black Gold tells a story of oil, urbanization, and colonialism in Kirkuk--and how these factors shaped the identities of Kirkuk's citizens, forming the foundation of an ethnic conflict. Arbella Bet-Shlimon reconstructs the twentieth-century history of Kirkuk to question the assumptions about the past underpinning today's ethnic divisions. In the early 1920s, when the Iraqi state was formed under British administration, group identities in Kirkuk were fluid. But as the oil industry fostered colonial power and Baghdad's influence over Kirkuk, intercommunal violence and competing claims to the city's history took hold. The ethnicities of Kurds, Turkmens, and Arabs in Kirkuk were formed throughout a century of urban development, interactions between communities, and political mobilization. Ultimately, this book shows how contentious politics in disputed areas are not primordial traits of those regions, but are a modern phenomenon tightly bound to the society and economics of urban life.