Cosmopolitan Africa: 1700-1875 (African World Histories) - Softcover

Getz, Trevor R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0199764700 ISBN 13: 9780199764709

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2012

Synopsis

Cosmopolitan 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.

About this title

About the Author:

Trevor R. Getz is Professor of History at San Francisco State University. He is the author of Abina and the Important Men (OUP, 2011) and Slavery and Reform in West Africa (2004), and coauthor of textbooks in world and African history.

Review:

"This is a most welcome addition to the existing literature. Cosmopolitan Africa encourages students to think not just about a key period in the history of Africa, but in doing so, it allows a rethinking of key concepts that have not been traditionally used in our perceptions of the African past."--Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia, Montclair State University

"By emphasizing the cosmopolitan nature of many African societies during the formative period for modernity, Getz succeeds in shredding some of the old and tired stereotypes that habitually removed Africa from the grand narrative of world history."--Maxim Matusevich, Seton Hall University

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0199764700
• ISBN 13: 9780199764709
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128