Description
Book SynopsisCosmopolitan Africa, 1700-1875, offers an alternative interpretation of the 175 years leading up to the formal colonization of Africa by Europeans. In this brief and affordable text, author and series editor Trevor R. Getz demonstrates how Africans pursued lives, constructed social settings, forged trading links, and imagined worlds that were sophisticated, flexible, and well adapted to the increasingly global and fast-paced interactions of this period. Getz''s interpretation of a cosmopolitan Africa is based on careful reading of Africans'' oral histories and traditions, written documents, and images of or from the eighteenth century. Examining this time period from both social and cultural perspectives, Cosmopolitan Africa, 1700-1875, helps students to re-envision African societies in the time before colonization.
Table of ContentsSeries Introduction ; Introduction ; Chapter 1: Ordering their worlds ; A Place to begin ; Spirit power and state power in Burganda ; Xhosa worlds: homestad, neighborhood, kingdom, ancestors ; Matriclans and entrepreneurs in the making of the Asante state ; Titles and lineages in Igbo-speaking societies ; Imperial Tunis ; Reigning in greed and anarchy in BaKongo and Jaga state and society ; Feature: Beatriz of Saint Anthony ; Chapter 2: Global Africa in an oceanic era ; An Oceanic era ; Mediterranean Africa ; Atlantic Africa ; Indian Ocean Africa ; Feature: The Chronicles of Pate and 19th century Swahili identity ; Chapter 3: Spiritual belief and practice in cosmopolitan Africa ; African <"world>" and African <"traditional>" religions ; African Islam in the eighteenth century ; African Christianity and Protestant evangelism ; Feature: The Xhosa Cattle-Killing ; Chapter 4: African economies and the industrial revolution ; Production and productivity in late eighteenth century Africa ; Africans and the industrial revolution ; Settlers, peasants, and plantations ; Feature: Muhammad Ali's Egypt ; Chapter 5: Africans write back ; Men and women in the middle? ; Egyptian intellectuals on France and Islam ; The Abbe Boilat ; James Africanus Horton ; The <"educated men>" of the Fante Confederation ; Jan Tzatzoe in Britain ; Towards colonialism?
