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The history of Nigeria in the nineteenth century was dominated by the collapse of Old Oyo, the rise of the Sokoto Caliphate in the north and Ibadan in the southwest, the abolition of the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade (TAST), the institution of legitimate commerce in forest produce, Christian missionary evangelization, and the beginnings of British colonialism. This essay examines how three conjoined events—the Abolition, legitimate commerce, and Christianity—shaped Nigeria’s history during the long nineteenth century, culminating in British colonial rule. It highlights the role of the abolition of TAST and British attitudes in sustaining domestic slavery, the contribution of the Abolition and the institution of legitimate commerce to the British colonization of Nigeria, and the differential impact of Christianity and formal education on regions and communities across Nigeria.

This chapter examines the impact of the Cold War on Africa. It explains that while Africa is the least-known Cold War battleground, the United States, the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba became embroiled in the internal affairs of countless African countries. The chapter analyzes the ideologies, practices, and interests of these main external actors and describes the four major arenas of conflict that are representative of broad trends in Cold War intervention in Africa. It also discusses how the Cold War altered the dynamics of local struggles, created unprecedented levels of destruction and widespread instability, and contributed to many of the problems that plague Africa today.

This article examines early urban societies in Africa. It emphasizes three key issues: the strikingly wide geographical range and structural variety of urban forms; the apparent dichotomy between more hierarchical and more heterarchical urban societies; the contrasting functions of towns in the service of state formation or inter-regional exchange. The earliest cities in Africa are linked to the great rivers of the continent, in particular the Nile and the Niger. There have also been significant urban expressions along the Mediterranean seaboard, or on the Red Sea and East African coast, where contact with neighbouring civilizations was part of the context. Yet, African urban forms assume a dazzling array of expressions, confounding traditional expectations of normative Old World archetypes of what defines ‘urban’.

Inquiries into commodification, social distinction, and fashion have offered fresh perspectives on social relations and cultural formations in Africa. Imported consumer goods were both elemental to social relationships and a cornerstone of Africa's global interfaces. This article explores how the social dynamics of consumer demand in Africa were shaped by, and gave shape to, larger social, economic, and political relationships from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century. This approach underscores the interrelation of African cultural imperatives and histories of globalization. Focusing on East Africa in the late nineteenth century, the article begins with a snapshot of consumer trends before the nineteenth century. It then examines three dimensions of consumption in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: marketing consumer objects, the social relations of consumption, and the ways manufacturers accommodated African consumer demand. Taken together, these themes augment our understanding of social change in Africa, contribute to wider reflections on consumption as a mode of trans-societal relation, and highlight how manufactured objects can be conceptually and physically transformed throughout their global life cycles.

The transatlantic slave trade peaked in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, when more than 80,000 slaves annually were being shipped from Africa for the Americas. This overshadowed the older-established trade in slaves northwards from West Africa across the Sahara Desert to the Muslim world, which was probably under 10,000 annually. Despite the long history of commerce, direct European involvement in Africa remained limited. In contrast to the Americas, European colonial occupation of African territory was minimal before the later nineteenth century. Some African states maintained diplomatic relations with their trading partners across the Atlantic. The operation of the Atlantic trade had the effect of linking up different parts of Africa with each other, as well as with Europe and the Americas. The autonomous (or northern-oriented) character of the West African historical process might seem to be self-evidently illustrated by one of the major developments of this period, a series of jihads, or ‘Islamic Revolutions’, in which Muslim clerics seized power from existing ruling groups.

This article describes the origins of Africa; the ‘First Great Transition’ of human history from foraging to food production; the era of agricultural elaboration; the ‘Second Great Transition’, from villages and tiny local political units to towns and states; early towns and states in West Africa and the Horn of Africa; the era of empires, and Africa in the Atlantic Age. To view Africa over the very long term is to discover that the notable developments of Africa's past followed similar pathways and proceeded at similar paces as comparable changes elsewhere in the world. Two great transitions of human history in the Holocene — from foraging to farming and, several thousand years later, from villages and informal governance to towns and states — shows that Africa was a continent of primary invention in those times.

Africa is the continent least associated with cities and it is the least urbanized today. The maps of early modern Europe reflect this bias, with elephants and other beasts featured in place of towns to fill in unknown spaces. However, towns have a long history in parts of Africa. This article begins by discussing the early cities in Africa. It then considers the colonial era, and suggests that the layered nature of urbanization over time sees decline in some urban networks but a rapid growth in cities along the lines of new economic forces, reflecting the power of both capitalist-inclined and racist ideas. In the challenges they began to raise to the forms put into play, the African masses began the process of urban reconstruction. The final sections cover the last half century, more or less, since the end of colonialism.

This chapter sketches a history of European colonial states in Africa, north and south of the Sahara, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It explains when and why colonial states emerged, what they did, how they worked, and who shaped them. Noting discrepancies between the theory and practice of colonial administration, the chapter shows that colonial administration was far more diffuse and less closely coordinated than official discourses of governance suggested. The performance of colonialism involved a wide range of actors: not only European military and civilian elites and African chiefs, but also African translators and tax collectors, as well as European forestry experts, missionaries, anthropologists, and settlers. The chapter also considers debates over reconciling the violence and exploitation of colonial states with their claims to, and aspirations for, social development in Africa, particularly in light of their relationship to the postcolonial states that succeeded them.

In recent decades, research on the African diaspora has increasingly expanded from its established focus on the northern Atlantic to Latin America, the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean world, and the African continent itself. This chapter discusses differing definitions of the diaspora, considers the role of pioneering scholars in early twentieth-century Cuba, Brazil, and the United States, and examines the debate between those who have stressed lines of cultural continuity between Africa and African American peoples, on the one hand, and those who have stressed cultural transformation or ‘creolization’ in the Americas, on the other. Recent research on African American religions has moved the field beyond the search for African origins by showing how the practitioners of these belief systems creatively and strategically imagined and reimagined ‘African’ ritual identities and Africa itself. Finally, the process of creolization in the African continent itself and in the Indian Ocean are considered.

This chapter offers a series of approaches to, and questions about, the different types of historical engagement to be found in African literatures. History, in African literatures, is not a term that applies simply to narratives that engage with the past: African literatures offer historians examples of the imagination in history and the imagination as history. The chapter proposes a three-tiered methodology: first, consideration of the time and place of literary production; second, consideration of the ways in which works of literature engage with the concepts of time, memory, and historical consciousness; and third, consideration of the temporal and geographical distances separating literary works from their current audiences.

This chapter outlines the significant trends in African nationalist and left-wing political thought from 1943—the year that witnessed the establishment of the Non-Europe Unity Movement (NEUM), the achievement of full membership rights for women in the African National Congress (ANC), and publication of the ANC’s policy manifesto, African Claims—to the banning of the liberation organizations after the 1960 Sharpeville massacre. These two decades were a period of rapid domestic and international change, the entrenchment of white supremacy by the apartheid regime, and the birth of new forms and philosophies of social struggle. They began with a mood of tremendous optimism among many African intellectuals that the end of World War II and the collapse of the British Empire (represented most immediately by the coming of Indian independence) would result in a new political reality for black South Africans. They ended with a wave of ferocious repression that drove the liberation organizations underground and into exile, destroyed any immediate hope for the peaceful dismantling of white minority rule, and began the transformation of apartheid into one of the most significant global issues of the later twentieth century.

Slave trading is a salient theme in African history and in the continent’s global connections between the eleventh and nineteenth centuries. This chapter focuses on the economic dimensions of African slave trades, summarizes the state of research on the size and demography of slaving, and explores the commodity trades of which slaving was a part. It argues that whereas the slave trades have typically been studied ocean-by-ocean with Africa as a point of departure, recentring the history of slaving onto the African continent allows for a global perspective in which all of Africa’s slave trades can be taken into account simultaneously and in dynamic interaction. Shifting focus onto Africa allows for a number of themes common to different slave trades to emerge, including the key role of textiles in all of them.

Although Atlantic Africa was the last of the continent's shores to establish regular overseas connections, many aspects of its interactions mirrored those of East and North Africa. Ghana's successors in the Western Sudan, the empires of Mali and Songhai, continued to assure safety, stability, and wealth to Arab and Berber traders from the north. Trans-Saharan trade supplied books and paper to the centres of Islamic learning at Timbuktu and elsewhere. In 1591, however, the power, wealth, and expansive policies of the Songhai rulers provoked a retaliatory invasion by the sultan of Morocco. This article explores the first two centuries of contacts in the African Atlantic under three interconnected and somewhat overlapping headings: the establishment of diplomatic relations, the growth of commercial exchanges, and the development of intercultural and cross-cultural relations. In each case it notes the different patterns that developed in Upper Guinea, the Gold Coast, the Niger Delta, and West Central Africa.

This chapter uses the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Indicators to demonstrate where Nigeria, as an African nation-state, depends on African ethnonational-based institutions that run parallel to and/or are combined with Western institutions to support Nigerians beyond what is reflected in the global indicators. The analysis is set in Afrocentric terms to counter the false idea that African institutions are marginalized or non-existent in the twenty-first century. This chapter demonstrates Nigeria’s dual system's viability and the need to adequately recognize and support African institutions in collaboration with nation-state Western-style institutions through brief histories and descriptions of the African education, health, and welfare institutions.

The course of the 2011 Libyan revolution, international intervention, and the regime’s application of armed force created new forms of sub-state affiliation and mobilization. International and regional intervention has exacerbated Libya’s chaos and deepened its fault lines. The civil war in 2014 was the culmination of these fissures and international pressures but conflicts since then by the myriad armed groups have become increasingly predatory—a scramble for the country’s oil wealth and the capture of state institutions. Libya’s conflicts are directly tied to the pathologies of the rentier oil state under Gaddafi and the failure of post-2011 distributive policies, along with endemic corruption and cronyism. Meanwhile, Western engagement is focused on parochial aims such as counterterrorism and stemming irregular migration. For the foreseeable future, Libya is likely to suffer from truncated sovereignty, a fractured national identity, regional meddling, simmering armed conflict, and hyper-localized politics.

Agriculture is the most critical economic activity in every society. It has historically remained the source of food that sustains the population and a source of wealth accumulation. This chapter looks at the intersection of environment, agriculture, and sustainable development. Whether it be crop production or animal husbandry, suitable agricultural production is dependent on a suitable and sustainable environment. This article looks at the link between the environment, agricultural productivity, and sustainable development. It also examines the link between contemporary agricultural crisis and environmental crisis and how both issues have posed a challenge to continued and future suitable, sustainable development.

Following on from the argument of the joint introduction to African nationalism, this chapter emphasizes Africa’s place in a global history of nationalism by emphasizing what seems to be a universal instinct to search out instructive history in order either to ride modernity’s adventure or to face up to its ordeal. The early scholarly analysis of African nationalism assumed that colonialism’s allegedly modernizing history was the past that counted, with nationalist elites riding the tide of social change that consigned ‘tribal loyalty’ to the past. Scholars are now more aware of deeper African pasts that made Africans see colonialism as less of an adventure, more of an ordeal, especially for deep-rooted ideas of household self-mastery as the basis of African citizenships. This archive of political thought encouraged local ethnic patriotisms in which the lively constitutional histories of African kingdoms, and the sense of ethnic moral economies outraged by class formation. Territorial nationalisms were shaped as much by such local energies as by demands for unity against colonial rule. Such contradictions could be at their most severe in southern Africa, as liberation movements had to take up arms against entrenched white minorities. African nationalisms, in short, have been shaped as much by African history as by imported ideas.

This chapter provides a wide-ranging overview of the extant historical literature and latest research on Apartheid South Africa. After assessing the contributions of scholars to debates about the origins and purposes of apartheid, the chapter focuses analytical attention on the paradoxical nature and legacies of the apartheid state. At the heart of the chapter is a concern with how the racially delimited political economy bequeathed by apartheid has shaped an increasingly dysfunctional post-apartheid order.

This chapter aims to place the Arab uprisings of 2011 in historical perspective, addressing questions of change and continuity by comparing and contrasting these uprisings with previous cases of contentious mobilization in the region, going back to the nineteenth century. The chapter argues that the uprisings can be linked to growing protests against domestic regimes in the region since the 1970s, and are similar to people-power uprisings in other parts of the world. The chapter points to the under-researched democratic genealogies of these uprisings, arguing that these played an important role in securing the unity of contentious crowds. The mass uprisings had their surprising and creative dimensions; they emerged without any preceding state breakdown and they constituted the people as a sovereign subject in a way distinctive from anticolonial nationalism.

This chapter examines Arab youth from within the historic backdrop of the Arab uprisings that engulfed more than half of the Arab states. Millions of people, the overwhelming majority of them born between the 1980s and 2000s, took to streets, schools, and social media, with demands for change. Within a short period, they were met with counterrevolutions, and a period of instability. Among the questions posed for contemplation at this historical juncture are: are the youth who crystallized into the generation of the uprisings causing a disruption to the prevailing order, and if so, in what direction? What are the active and passive strategies young people are pursuing to unsettle the status quo and for what kind of alternative order? We address these questions through a focus on two areas: education and schooling; and virtual communities.