articles
The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History
Edited by John Parker and Richard Reid
Oxford University Press 536pp £95
Colonialism was predicated on the negation of African history or, as one of the two editors of this volume, John Parker, wrote in his African History: A Very Short Introduction (2007): a ‘general European perception [...] that Africa, especially Sub-Saharan Africa, had no history to speak of’. The emergence of sub-Saharan African history in both western and African universities is thus squarely to be placed in the context of decolonisation and what contributor Jean Allman describes as the ‘nationalist fervour of the 1950s and 1960s’. It was during this period that the first generation of Africa’s professional historians set about the exhilarating task of rescuing the continent’s past from neglect and scholarly condescension. Those pioneering days are long gone and African history is now recognised as a fully established field within the wider historical discipline. This handsome volume is primarily to be read as a celebration of the enormous advances made by historians of Africa since the specialism took its first tentative steps more than 50 years ago.
Intended to present an accessible picture of the state of the field and the research concerns that animate it, the Handbook is organised thematically, rather than chronologically, with its 26 substantive chapters falling into five separate parts. While seven essays address ‘Key Themes in African History’, the remaining chapters deal with different aspects of ‘The Colonial Encounter’, ‘Religion and Belief’, ‘Society and Economy’ and, finally, ‘Arts and the Media’. Written by leading experts in their respective subfields, the chapters invariably succeed in presenting lucid and succinct discussions of the relevant literature on the topic.
One worrying development over recent decades has been the growing marginalisation of precolonial history to the advantage of the study of more recent
Edited by John Parker and Richard Reid
Oxford University Press 536pp £95
Colonialism was predicated on the negation of African history or, as one of the two editors of this volume, John Parker, wrote in his African History: A Very Short Introduction (2007): a ‘general European perception [...] that Africa, especially Sub-Saharan Africa, had no history to speak of’. The emergence of sub-Saharan African history in both western and African universities is thus squarely to be placed in the context of decolonisation and what contributor Jean Allman describes as the ‘nationalist fervour of the 1950s and 1960s’. It was during this period that the first generation of Africa’s professional historians set about the exhilarating task of rescuing the continent’s past from neglect and scholarly condescension. Those pioneering days are long gone and African history is now recognised as a fully established field within the wider historical discipline. This handsome volume is primarily to be read as a celebration of the enormous advances made by historians of Africa since the specialism took its first tentative steps more than 50 years ago.
Intended to present an accessible picture of the state of the field and the research concerns that animate it, the Handbook is organised thematically, rather than chronologically, with its 26 substantive chapters falling into five separate parts. While seven essays address ‘Key Themes in African History’, the remaining chapters deal with different aspects of ‘The Colonial Encounter’, ‘Religion and Belief’, ‘Society and Economy’ and, finally, ‘Arts and the Media’. Written by leading experts in their respective subfields, the chapters invariably succeed in presenting lucid and succinct discussions of the relevant literature on the topic.
One worrying development over recent decades has been the growing marginalisation of precolonial history to the advantage of the study of more recent