LibGuides: Modern World History: Scramble for Africa

Scholarly Sources within the JSCC Library

Back to Africa: Benjamin Coates and the Colonization Movement in America, 1848-1880 by Emma J. Lapsansky-Werner (Editor); Margaret Hope Bacon (Editor)
ISBN: 9780271026848
A Slave Between Empires : A Transimperial History of North Africa
ISBN: 9780231549554
In June 1887, a man known as General Husayn, a manumitted slave turned dignitary in the Ottoman province of Tunis, passed away in Florence after a life crossing empires. As a youth, Husayn was brought from Circassia to Turkey, where he was sold as a slave. In Tunis, he ascended to the rank of general before the French conquest forced his exile to the northern shores of the Mediterranean. His death was followed by wrangling over his estate that spanned a surprising array of actors: Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II and his viziers; the Tunisian, French, and Italian governments; and representatives of Muslim and Jewish diasporic communities. A Slave Between Empires investigates Husayn's trans-imperial life and the posthumous battle over his fortune to recover the transnational dimensions of North African history. M'hamed Oualdi places Husayn within the international context of the struggle between Ottoman and French forces for control of the Mediterranean amid social and intellectual ferment that crossed empires.
The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy in the Sahara and the Hijaz by Mostafa Minawi
ISBN: 9780804795142
The Ottoman Scramble for Africa is the first book to tell the story of the Ottoman Empire's expansionist efforts during the age of high imperialism. Following key representatives of the sultan on their travels across Europe, Africa, and Arabia at the close of the nineteenth century, it takes the reader from Istanbul to Berlin, from Benghazi to Lake Chad Basin to the Hijaz, and then back to Istanbul. It turns the spotlight on the Ottoman Empire's expansionist strategies in Africa and its increasingly vulnerable African and Arabian frontiers. Drawing on previously untapped Ottoman archival evidence, Mostafa Minawi examines how the Ottoman participation in the Conference of Berlin and involvement in aggressive competition for colonial possessions in Africa were part of the self-reimagining of this once powerful global empire.
Rogue Empires: Contracts and Conmen in Europe’s Scramble for Africa by Steven Press
ISBN: 9780674971851
In the 1880s, Europeans descended on Africa and grabbed vast swaths of the continent, using documents, not guns, as their weapon of choice. Rogue Empires follows a paper trail of questionable contracts to discover the confident men whose actions touched off the Scramble for Africa. Many of them were would-be kings who sought to establish their autonomous empires across the African continent—often at odds with traditional European governments which competed for control. From 1882 to 1885, independent European businessmen and firms (many of doubtful legitimacy) produced hundreds of deeds purporting to buy political rights from indigenous African leaders whose understanding of these agreements was usually deemed irrelevant. A system of privately governed empires, some spanning hundreds of thousands of square miles, promptly sprang up in the heart of Africa.
Mining Africa: Law, Environment, Society and Politics in Historical and Multidisciplinary Perspectives by Artwell Nhemachena & V. Warikandwa
ISBN: 9789956764327
The book comes at the right time when matters of African mining and environment are increasingly coming to the fore in the light of discourses about the new 21st-century scramble for African resources, in which big transnational corporations and nations are jostling to suck Africa dry in their race to control planetary resources. It is a book that speaks to contemporary broader issues of (de-)coloniality and the transformation of African minds and African environmental resources.

Africa's Revolutionary Nineteenth Century and the Idea of the "Scramble".
by Richard Reid from the American Historical Review
ABSTRACT
This paper seeks to position the Scramble for Africa in the context of the continent's transformative, global nineteenth century. While imperial historiography develops apace, Africa-facing analyses of the continent's partition and the processes that led to it are increasingly rare. European expansion into Africa was characterized by an aggressive dynamism, and millions of Africans experienced profound crisis in the process of the establishment of colonial rule. Yet Africa's revolutionary nineteenth century was both driven by, and culminated in, complex processes of co-option on the part of Africans and Europeans. The paper proposes that a more Africa-centered assessment of the Scramble is possible, one which aims to contextualize the partition of the continent as part of an ongoing, endogenously shaped but often exogenously connected, transformation in political, economic, and social organization and behavior. While no single overarching theory can apply to the entire continent, it is possible to identify dynamics and processes for change that recur across Africa, from political and military reform to economic innovation. These point toward possibilities for reframing Africa's development in the late precolonial period, and enable us to challenge the hegemony long enjoyed by scholars of European empires.
Warlordism in the Congo Basin between the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.
by Giacomo Macola from the International Journal of African Historical Studies
ABSTRACT
This paper deploys the concept of "warlordism" to make sense of the bloody history of the Congo basin between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Growing out of the ruins of older and less predatory governance models, "warlord states" came of age in the central African interior in the second half of the nineteenth century, the era of the long-distance caravan trades in ivory and slaves. The essay examines their emergence and distinguishing attributes. It then argues that the extractive warlord states of the Congo basin prefigured, and consequently easily adapted to, the looting economy of the Congo Free State, which therefore granted them an extended lease of life during the "Scramble for Africa" and the early colonial period. The essay's epilogue briefly raises the question of historical continuities and asks whether the concept of warlordism might prove helpful in accounting for the Congo's exceptionally violent postcoloniality.

The Fortunes of Africa: a 5000-year history of wealth, greed, and endeavour by Martin Meredith
Available for Checkout at the JSCC Jackson Library
DT20 .M47 2014

In this vast and vivid panorama of history, Martin Meredith follows the fortunes of Africa over 5,000 years. With a compelling narrative, he traces the rise and fall of ancient kingdoms and empires; the spread of Christianity and Islam; the enduring quest for gold and other riches; the exploits of explorers and missionaries; and the impact of European colonization. He examines, too, the fate of modern African states and concludes with a glimpse of their future.
Land of Tears: the exploration and exploitation of equatorial Africa by Robert Harms
Available for Checkout at the JSCC Jackson Library
DT352.7 .H373 2019

In Land of Tears, historian Robert Harms reconstructs the chaotic process by which the heart of Africa was utterly transformed in the nineteenth century and the rainforest of the Congo River basin became one of the most brutally exploited places on earth. Ranging from remote African villages to European diplomatic meetings to Connecticut piano-key factories, Harms reveals how equatorial Africa became fully, fatefully, and tragically enmeshed within our global world.

African Independence Movement

African Independence Movement
from Encylopedia of Diversity and Social Justice

Modern World History

Search Terms

Africa 1914

Scholarly Sources within the JSCC Library

African Independence Movement