Professor Shepperson says of this regional economic history of East Central Africa that it is a "refreshing combination of a scholarly survey of a relatively new field of African history and of a contribution to an important controversy on African underdevelopment." Alpers has written a history of the penetration and changing character of international trade in East Central Africa from the fifteenth to the later nineteenth century. His study of him focuses on a vast and little known region that includes southern Tanzania, northern Mozambique, and Malawi, with extension north along the Swahili coast and west as far as the Lunda state of the Mwata Kazembe. He examines both the competition between traders and their internal impact on the various societies of East Central Africa. Alpers' main concern is to demonstrate that the historical roots of underdevelopment in the area are to be found 'in the system of international trade which was initiated by Arabs in the fifteenth century, seized and extended by the Portuguese in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, dominated by a complex mixture of Indian, Arab and Western capitalisms in the nineteenth century'. Thus this readable and original book places East African trading systems within the larger Western Indian Ocean system and in the world capitalist system. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1975.

Professor Shepperson says of this regional economic history of East Central Africa that it is a "refreshing combination of a scholarly survey of a relatively new field of African history and of a contribution to an important controversy on African underdevelopment." Alpers has written a history of the penetration and changing character of international trade in East Central Africa from the fifteenth to the later nineteenth century. His study focuses on a vast and little known region that includes southern Tanzania, northern Mozambique, and Malawi, with extension north along the Swahili coast and west as far as the Lunda state of the Mwata Kazembe. He examines both the competition between traders and their internal impact on the various societies of East Central Africa. Alpers' main concern is to demonstrate that the historical roots of underdevelopment in the area are to be found 'in the system of international trade which was initiated by Arabs in the fifteenth century, seized and extended by the Portuguese in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, dominated by a complex mixture of Indian, Arab and Western capitalisms in the nineteenth century'. Thus this readable and original book places East African trading systems within the larger Western Indian Ocean system and in the world capitalist system. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1975.

Commercial Transitions and Abolition in West Africa 1630–1860 by Angus Dalrymple-Smith offers a new interpretation of the move from slave exports to ‘legitimate commerce’ in the Gold Coast, the Bight of Benin and the Bight of Biafra.

Explores the history of land dispossession, slavery, colonialism, and inequality in Angola, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.

The Game of Conservation is a brilliantly crafted and highly readable examination of nature protection around the world. Twentieth-century nature conservation treaties often originated as attempts to regulate the pace of killing rather than as attempts to protect animal habitat. Some were prompted by major breakthroughs in firearm techniques, such as the invention of the elephant gun and grenade harpoons, but agricultural development was at least as important as hunting regulations in determining the fate of migratory species. The treaties had many defects, yet they also served the goal of conservation to good effect, often saving key species from complete extermination and sometimes keeping the population numbers at viable levels. It is because of these treaties that Africa is dotted with large national parks, that North America has an extensive network of bird refuges, and that there are any whales left in the oceans. All of these treaties are still in effect today, and all continue to influence nature-protection efforts around the globe. Drawing on a wide variety of primary and secondary sources, Mark Cioc shows that a handful of treaties—all designed to protect the world’s most commercially important migratory species—have largely shaped the contours of global nature conservation over the past century. The scope of the book ranges from the African savannahs and the skies of North America to the frigid waters of the Antarctic.