Colonialism and Decolonization

The Komedie Stamboel
Popular Theater in Colonial Indonesia, 1891–1903
By Matthew Isaac Cohen

Originating in 1891 in the port city of Surabaya, the Komedie Stamboel, or Istanbul-style theater, toured colonial Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia by rail and steamship. The company performed musical versions of the Arabian Nights and European fairy tales and operas such as Sleeping Beauty and Aida, as well as Indian and Persian romances, Southeast Asian chronicles, true crime stories, and political allegories.

African Underclass
Urbanisation, Crime, and Colonial Order in Dar es Salaam
By Andrew Burton

This study examines the social, political, and administrative repercussions of rapid urban growth in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Imperial Gullies
Soil Erosion and Conservation in Lesotho
By Kate B. Showers

Once the grain basket for South Africa, much of Lesotho has become a scarred and degraded landscape. The nation’s spectacular erosion and gullying have concerned environmentalists and conservationists for more than half a century. In Imperial Gullies: Soil Erosion and Conservation in Lesotho, Kate B. Showers documents the truth behind this devastation.Showers reconstructs the history of the landscape, beginning with a history of the soil.

Race, Resistance, and the Boy Scout Movement in British Colonial Africa
By Timothy H. Parsons

Conceived by General Sir Robert Baden-Powell as a way to reduce class tensions in Edwardian Britain, scouting evolved into an international youth movement. It offered a vision of romantic outdoor life as a cure for disruption caused by industrialization and urbanization. Scouting’s global spread was due to its success in attaching itself to institutions of authority.

Portugal and Africa
By David Birmingham

Portugal was the first European nation to assert itself aggressively in African affairs. David Birmingham’s Portugal and Africa, a collection of uniquely accessible historical essays, surveys this colonial encounter from its earliest roots.

Tensions of Empire
Japan and Southeast Asia in the Colonial and Postcolonial World
By Ken’ichi Goto
· Edited by Paul H. Kratoska

Beginning with the closing decade of European colonial rule in Southeast Asia and covering the wartime Japanese empire and its postwar disintegration, Tensions of Empire focuses on the Japanese in Southeast Asia, Indonesians in Japan, and the legacy of the war in Southeast Asia. It also examines Japanese perceptions of Southeast Asia and the lingering ambivalence toward Japanese involvement in Asia and toward the war in particular.Drawing

Social History and African Environments
Edited by William Beinart and JoAnn McGregor

The explosion of interest in African environmental history has stimulated research and writing on a wide range of issues facing many African nations.This collection represents some of the finest studies to date. The general topics include African environmental ideas and practices; colonial science, the state and African responses; and settlers and Africans’ culture and nature.

Eroding the Commons
The Politics of Ecology in Baringo, Kenya, 1890s–1963
By David M. Anderson

Colonial Baringo was largely unnoticed until drought and localized famine in the mid-1920s led to claims that its crisis was brought on by overcrowding and livestock mismanagement. In response to the alarm over erosion, the state embarked on a program for rehabilitation, conservation, and development.Eroding

An American Colony
Regionalism and the Roots of Midwestern Culture
By Edward Watts

The Old Northwest—the region now known as the Midwest—has been largely overlooked in American cultural history, represented as a place smoothly assimilated into the expanding, manifestly-destined nation. An American Colony: Regionalism and the Roots of Midwestern Culture studies the primary texts and principal conflicts of the settlement of the Old Northwest to reveal that its entry into the nation’s culture was not without problems.

Soldiers, Airmen, Spies, and Whisperers
The Gold Coast in World War II
By Nancy Ellen Lawler

The Gold Coast became important to the Allied war effort in WWII, necessitating the creation of elaborate propaganda and espionage networks, the activities of which ranged from rumor-mongering to smuggling and sabotage.

Tropical Pioneers
Human Agency and Ecological Change in the Highlands of Sri Lanka, 1800–1900
By James L. A. Webb Jr.

In 1800, the highlands of Sri Lanka had some of the most biologically diverse primary tropical rainforest ecosystems in the world. By 1900, only a few craggy corners and mountain caps had been spared the fire stick. Highland villagers, through the extension of slash-and-burn agriculture, and British managers, through the creation of plantations—first of coffee, then cinchona, and finally tea—had removed virtually the entire primary forest cover.Tropical

West African Challenge to Empire
Culture and History in the Volta-Bani Anticolonial War
By Mahir Şaul and Patrick Royer

West African Challenge to Empire examines the anticolonial war in the Volta and Bani region in 1915–16. It was the largest challenge that the French ever faced in their West African colonial empire, and one of the largest armed oppositions to colonialism anywhere in Africa. How such a movement could be organized in the face of European technological superiority despite the fact that this region is generally described as having consisted of rival villages and descent groups is a puzzle.

Environmental Justice in South Africa
Edited by David A. McDonald

Environmental Justice in South Africa provides a systematic overview of the first ten years of postapartheid environmental politics. Written by leading activists and academics in the field, this edited collection offers the first critical perspective of environmental justice theory and practice in South Africa.

Paths of Accommodation
Muslim Societies and French Colonial Authorities in Senegal and Mauritania, 1880–1920
By David Robinson

Between 1880 and 1920, Muslim Sufi orders became pillars of the colonial regimes and economies of Senegal and Mauritania. In Paths of Accommodation, David Robinson examines the ways in which the leaders of the orders negotiated relations with the Federation of French West Africa in order to preserve autonomy within the religious, social, and economic realms while abandoning the political sphere to their non-Muslim rulers.This

African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya, 1900–1950
By Tabitha Kanogo

This book explores the history of African womanhood in colonial Kenya. By focussing on key sociocultural institutions and practices around which the lives of women were organized, and on the protracted debates that surrounded these institutions and practices during the colonial period, it investigates the nature of indigenous, mission, and colonial control of African women.The

Ecology Control and Economic Development in East African History
The Case of Tanganyika, 1850–1950
By Helge Kjekshus

This pioneering book was one of the first to place the history of East Africa within the context of the environment. It has been used continuously for student teaching. It is now reissued with an introduction placing it within the debate that has developed on the subject; there is also an updated bibliography.The book puts people at the centre of events. It thus serves as a modification to nationalist history with its emphasis on leaders.

The Decolonization of Africa
By David Birmingham

This bold, popularizing synthesis presents a readily accessible introduction to one of the major themes of twentieth-century world history. Between 1922, when self-government was restored to Egypt, and 1994, when nonracial democracy was achieved in South Africa, 54 new nations were established in Africa.

Decolonization and Independence in Kenya, 1940–1993
Edited by B. A. Ogot and W. R. Ochieng

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.Professor B. A. Ogot says:“The main purpose of the book is to show that decolonization does not only mean the transfer of alien power to sovereign nationhood; it must also entail the liberation of the worlds of spirit and culture, as well as economics and politics.“The

Decolonization and Independence in Kenya, 1940–1993
Edited by B. A. Ogot and W. R. Ochieng

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.Professor B. A. Ogot says:“The main purpose of the book is to show that decolonization does not only mean the transfer of alien power to sovereign nationhood; it must also entail the liberation of the worlds of spirit and culture, as well as economics and politics.“The

Soldiers of Misfortune
lvoirien Tirailleurs of World War II
By Nancy Ellen Lawler

This is a study of the African veterans of a European war. It is a story of men from the Cote d‘Ivoire, many of whom had seldom traveled more than a few miles from their villages, who served France as tirailleurs (riflemen) during World War II.

Zanzibar under Colonial Rule
Edited by Abdul Sheriff and Ed Ferguson

Zanzibar stands at the center of the Indian Ocean system’s involvement in the history of Eastern Africa. This book follows on from the period covered in Abdul Sheriff’s acclaimed Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar.The first part of the book shows the transition of Zanzibar from the commercial economy of the nineteenth century to the colonial economy of the twentieth century.The authors begin with the abolition of the slave trade in 1873 that started the process of transformation.

Quivira
Europeans in the region of the Santa Fe Trail, 1540–1820
By William Brandon

New Mexico was a frontier to the wilderness, for Europeans, for almost three hundred years. No other frontier history in the area of what is now the United States can support such continuity, or even come close. It was the outside edge of the northern borderlands of New Spain, that later became the northern borderlands of Mexico. It was the western rim of the world for the French explorers and fur traders in the Mississippi valley and for the English who followed them there.

Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya
The Dialectic of Domination
By Bruce Berman

This history of the political economy of Kenya is the first full length study of the development of the colonial state in Africa.Professor Berman argues that the colonial state was shaped by the contradictions between maintaining effective political control with limited coercive force and ensuring the profitable articulation of metropolitan and settler capitalism with African societies.This

The Mau Mau War in Perspective
By Frank Furedi

The book breaks new ground in following the story of the participants of the rural movement during the decade after the defeat of the Mau Mau. New archival sources and interviews provide exciting material on the mechanics of the sociology of decolonization and on the containment of rural radicalism in Kenya. For the first time an account of decolonization in Kenya based on primary sources is offered to the reader.The

Khaki and Blue
Military and Police in British Colonial Africa
By Anthony Clayton and David Killingray

Drawing upon a survey of former police officers in the six British colonies of Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Zambia, and Malawi, Clayton and Killingray examine the work of colonial law enforcement during the last years of British supremacy. In addition to such basic institutional information as the development of police forces from local militia, the training of African recruits, and the africanization of the police forces, the authors examine the typical activities of the colonial police.

Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau, 1905–1963
By Tabitha Kanogo

This is a study of the genesis, evolution, adaptation and subordination of the Kikuyu squatter labourers, who comprised the majority of resident labourers on settler plantations and estates in the Rift Valley Province of the White Highlands. These squatters played a crucial role in the initial build-up of the events that led to the outbreak of the Mau Mau war.