Search results

In the late 19th century, the port of Massawa on the Red Sea was a thriving, vibrant, multiethnic commercial hub. Red Sea Citizens tells the story of how Massawa rose to prominence as one of Northeast Africa's most important shipping centres. Jonathan Miran reconstructs the social, material, religious, and cultural history of this mercantile community in a period of sweeping change. He shows how Massawa and its citizens benefited from migrations across the Indian Ocean, the Arabian peninsula, Eg...

Why has Libya fallen apart since 2011? The world has largely given up trying to understand how the revolution that toppled Muammar Gaddafi has left the country a failed state and a major security headache for Europe. Gaddafi's police state has been replaced by yet another dictatorship, amidst a complex conflict of myriad armed groups, Islamists, tribes, towns and secularists. What happened? One of few foreign journalists to have lived in post-revolution Tripoli, Ulf Laessing has unique insight i...

In this path-breaking study about Israel's position vis-a-vis the Mediterranean Arab states of the Middle East and Maghreb, Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, as well as the France, Italy, and Spain, wide regional neighboring relationships are analyzed and defined by dominant factors such as "fluctuating relations", "confrontation and realpolitik", "radicalism versus moderation", and the "complexities of political, military, intelligence, economic, and cultural connections." A central motif is the challeng...

The history of Roman North Africa starts in 146 bce with the final defeat and razing of Carthage, Rome's only real rival for supremacy in the Mediterranean. After Egypt was integrated under Augustus in 30 bce, the Romans ruled over the entire Mediterranean coast of Africa, a territory stretching from the Ampsaga River in the west to the border of Cyrenaica, making it not only the biggest but perhaps also the most important colony, frequently being called the 'granary of the empire'. It was also...

A new history of twentieth-century North Africa, that gives voice to the musicians who defined an era and the vibrant recording industry that carried their popular sounds from the colonial period through decolonization. If twentieth-century stories of Jews and Muslims in North Africa are usually told separately, Recording History demonstrates that we have not been listening to what brought these communities together: Arab music. For decades, thousands of phonograph records flowed across North Af...

In the early 1880s the Mahdi unleashed a spectacularly successful jihadist uprising against Egyptian colonial rule in the Sudan. Early in1884 Cairo bowed to British pressure to withdraw. Beyond the Reach of Empire describes how Major General Charles Gordon was despatched to evacuate Khartoum and turn the Sudan over to self-rule. It goes on to explain how and why the mission backfired, and then homes in on Sir Garnet Wolseley's planning and execution of the long-delayed Gordon Relief Expedition w...

Emerging in the realm of popular entertainment, Jean-Charles Langlois’s Panorama of Algiers (1833) drew an audience in much the same way that the arcades drew consumers. Just as the consumption of material goods never fully satiates the consumer, the landscape of Algiers, as represented in Langlois’s panorama, kept the French coming back for more. This monumental painting—the result of Colonel Langlois’s involvement in the 1830 siege of Algiers—offered a French audience a spectacle of the furthe...

The resurgence of regionalism is borne out of the current political logjams that have characterized the governance and operations of multilateral trading system over the past one decade and a half. Oloruntoba critically examines Euro-Nigeria relations within the context of the Economic Partnership Agreements in terms of the political and economic implications of the agreements on Nigeria's non-oil exports sub-sectors. Set within one of the main objectives of the Economic Partnership Agreements...

The war in air over North Africa and the Mediterranean during the Second World War has long been overshadowed by the battle on the ground. Between 1940 and 1943 Italy's Regia Aeronautica and then Germany's Luftwaffe waged a concerted aerial campaign against the British, yet apart from the bitter fight for Malta, this aspect of the conflict is rarely given the attention it deserves. Anthony Tucker-Jones, in this vivid photographic history, provides a fascinating introduction to it. The wartime p...

Cohen and Jaidi trace the development of contemporary Morocco in the Islamic world of North Africa, which is currently at the forefront of the clash between Western-style development and the politicized Islam that now pervades the Arab world. By applying globalization theory to detailed accounts of everyday life in an Arab society, the book is uniquely suited to students. Morocco in particular is a good place to look at this extremely important confrontation. It is among the most liberalized Is...

"Fanon was consummately incapable of telling the story of himself. He lived in the immediacy of the moment, with an intensity that embodied everything he evoked. Fanon's discourse pertained to a present tense that was unburdened by its narrative past. The little we knew about his personal life had been gleaned from passing allusions, brief glimpses that vanished as quickly as they appeared.... Fanon had a profound talent for life; he was a man who wanted to be the subject and actor of his own li...

Silencing the Past explores the political history of North African Jews, particularly in Tunisia, in order to shed new light on our understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the current Arab Spring revolutions. This book provides a unique political and personal perspective that relates the current upheavals in the Arab world to the rich and complex Jewish history in the area. Boublil skillfully leads the reader through the political implications of silences surrounding what happened...