'A superb book...genuinely innovative' Jack Spence OBE, King's College London
Over the last half century, sub-Saharan Africa has not had one history, but many. Histories that have intertwined, converged and diverged. They have involved a continuing process of decolonization and state-building, conflict, economic problems but also progress and the perpetual interplay of structure and agency.
This new view of those histories looks in particular at the relationship between territorial, economic, political and societal structures and human agency in the complex and sometimes confusing development of an independent Africa. The story starts well before the granting of independence to Ghana in 1957, but the book also looks at Africa in the closing decades of the old millennium and opening ones of the new. This is a book, too, about the history of the peoples of Africa and their struggle for economic development against the global economic straitjacket into which they were strapped by colonial rule and decolonisation. The importance of imposed or inherited structures, whether the global capitalist system, of which Africa is a subordinate part, or the artificial and often inappropriate state borders and political systems is discussed in the light of the exercise of agency by African peoples, political movements and leaders.
- ISBN10 0141984090
- ISBN13 9780141984094
- Publish Date 26 January 2017 (first published 14 January 2016)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Penguin Books Ltd
- Format Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
- Pages 496
- Language English