Eastern African Studies

Decolonization & Independence in Kenya, 1940–1993

This is a sharply observed assessment of the history of the last half century by a distinguished group of historians of Kenya. At the same time the book is a courageous reflection in the dilemmas of African nationhood.…

Women, Work & Domestic Virtue in Uganda, 1900–2003

This groundbreaking book by two leading scholars offers a complete historical picture of women and their work in Uganda, tracing developments from precolonial times to the present and into the future. Setting women’s economic activities into a broader political, social, and cultural context, it provides the first general account of their experiences amid the changes that shaped the country.…

Slavery in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa

Slavery in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa is a collection of ten studies by the most prominent historians of the region. Slavery was more important in the Great Lakes region of Eastern Africa than often has been assumed, and Africans from the interior played a more complex role than was previously recognized.…

War in Pre-Colonial Eastern Africa

The Patterns and Meanings of State-Level Conflict in the 19th Century

War in Pre-Colonial Eastern Africa examines the nature and objectives of violence in the region in the nineteenth century. It is particularly concerned with highland Ethiopia and the Great Lakes.…

Cultivating Success in Uganda

Kigezi Farmers and Colonial Policies

Kigezi, a district in southwestern Uganda, is exceptional in many ways. In contrast to many other parts of the colonial world, this district did not adopt cash crops. Soil conservation practices were successfully adopted, and the region maintained a remarkably developed and individualized land market from the early colonial period.…

Emancipation without Abolition in German East Africa, c. 1884–1914

This study examines the complex history of slavery in East Africa, focusing on the area that came under German colonial rule. In contrast to the policy pursued at the time by other colonial powers in Africa, the German authorities did not legally abolish slavery in their colonial territories.…

Ethnic Federalism

The Ethiopian Experience in Comparative Perspective

Since 1991, Ethiopia has gone further than any other country in using ethnicity as the fundamental organizing principle of a federal system of government. And yet this pioneering experiment in “ethnic federalism” has been largely ignored in the growing literature on democratization and ethnicity in Africa and on the accommodation of ethnic diversity in democratic states.…

Crisis & Decline in Bunyoro

Population & Environment in Western Uganda 1860–1955

The Kingdom of Bunyoro's story demonstrates convincingly that environmental change there was not a uniform, statewide process. In one of the first studies of the political ecology of a major African kingdom, Crisis & Decline in Bunyoro addresses state capacity, ideology, and government legitimacy as crucial issues.…

In Search of a Nation

Histories of Authority & Dissidence in Tanzania

The double-sided nature of African nationalism—its capacity to inspire expressions of unity, and its tendency to narrow political debate—are explored by sixteen historians, focusing on the experience of Tanzania.…

A History of the Excluded

Making Family a Refuge from State in Twentieth-Century Tanzania

The twentieth-century history of Njombe, the Southern Highlands district of Tanzania, can aptly be summed up as exclusion within incorporation. Njombe was marginalized even as it was incorporated into the colonial economy.…

Black Poachers, White Hunters

A Social History of Hunting in Colonial Kenya

For centuries, Kenya’s game-laden plains and forests were the rewarding hunting grounds of her native African population. Black Poachers, White Hunters traces the history of hunting there in the colonial era, describing the British attempt to impose the practices and values of nineteenth-century European aristocratic hunts.…

Dhows and the Colonial Economy of Zanzibar, 1860-1970

Conventional history assumes that the rise of the steamship trade killed off the Indian Ocean dhow trade in the twentieth century. Erik Gilbert argues that the dhow economy played a major role in shaping the economic and social life of colonial Zanzibar.…

African Underclass

Urbanisation, Crime, & Colonial Order in Dar es Salaam

African Underclass examines the social, political, and administrative repercussions of rapid urban growth in Dar es Salaam. The origins of an often coercive response to urbanization in postcolonial Tanzania are traced back to the colonial period.…

Islands of Intensive Agriculture in Eastern Africa

Islands of intensive agriculture are areas of local cultivation surrounded by low-density livestock herders or extensive cultivators. Along the line of the East Africa Rift Valley, and in the highlands on either side, communities of considerable historical depth have developed highly specialized agricultural regimes, employing such labor-intensive devices as furrow irrigation, hillside terracing, and stall-feeding of cattle.…

Leaf of Allah

Khat & Agricultural Transformation in Harerge, Ethiopia, 1875–1991

Khat is a quasi-legal psychoactive shrub, produced and marketed in the province of Harerge, Ethiopia, and widely consumed throughout Northeast Africa. In the late nineteenth century the main cash crop of Harerge was coffee.…

Mau Mau and Nationhood

Arms, Authority, and Narration

Fifty years after the declaration of the state of emergency, Mau Mau still excites argument and controversy, not least in Kenya itself. Mau Mau and Nationhood is a collection of essays providing the most recent thinking on the uprising and its aftermath.…

Political Power in Pre-Colonial Buganda

Economy, Society, and Warfare in the Nineteenth Century

Blessed with fertile and well-watered soil, East Africa's kingdom of Buganda supported a relatively dense population and became a major regional power by the mid-nineteenth century. This complex and fascinating state has also long been in need of a thorough study that cuts through the image of autocracy and military might.…

A Modern History of the Somali

Nation and State in the Horn of Africa

This latest edition of A Modern History of the Somali brings I. M. Lewis's definitive history up to date and shows the amazing continuity of Somali forms of social organization. Lewis's history portrays the ingeniousness with which the Somali way of life has been adapted to all forms of modernity.…

Pioneers of Change in Ethiopia

The Reformist Intellectuals of the Early Twentieth Century

In this exciting new study, Bahru Zewde, one of the foremost historians of modern Ethiopia, has constructed a collective biography of a remarkable group of men and women in a formative period of their country's history.…

Potent Brews

A Social History of Alcohol in East Africa, 1850–1999

In this first general history of alcohol and drinking in East Africa, Justin Willis's central theme is power—from customary beliefs in alcohol as a symbol of authority and a means of enhancement and privilege, to the use of power in advertising, and discourse on the consumption of modern bottled beers and spirits.…

Southern Marches of Imperial Ethiopia

Essays in History and Social Anthropology

This pioneering book, first published to wide acclaim in 1986, traces the way the Ethiopian center and the peripheral regions of the country affected each other. It looks specifically at the expansion of the highland Ethiopian state into the western and southern lowlands from the 1890s up to 1974.…