This newly comprehensive and detailed exploration of the African past, reaching from prehistory to approximately 1870, is intended to provide a fully up-to-date textbook, thematically organized, for undergraduate students of African history.
Reflecting several emphases in recent scholarship, Professor Isichei focuses on the changing modes of production, on gender relations and on ecology, laying particular stress on viewing history 'from below'. A distinctive theme is to be found in her analyses of cognitive history.
The work falls into three sections. The first comprises a historiographic analysis, covering the period from the dawn of prehistory to the end of the Early Iron Age. The second and third sections are, for the most part, organised on regional lines; the second section ends in the sixteenth century; the third carries the story on to 1870. Explaining each facet of the continent's history with exceptional erudition, balance and sympathy, Professor Isichei displays both an immense learning and a thorough command of the literature.
A second volume, now in preparation, will cover the period from 1870 to 1995.
Author(s): Elizabeth Isichei
Edition: paperback
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 1997
Language: English
Commentary: roughly cleaned, tesseract OCR, optimized for size
Pages: 596
City: Cambridge
A history of African societies to 1870
Contents
List of illustrations
Figures
1 Human evolution
2 Long-term climate change
3 African language families: Afroasiatic
4 African language families: Nilo-Saharan
5 African language families: Kordofanian and Niger-Congo
Maps
1 Human evolution: archaeological sites
2 African language families
3 Bantu languages
4 Cradles of domestication
5 Central Africa
6 Eastern Africa
7 South Africa
8 Northern Africa in antiquity
9 Northern Africa (seventh to twelfth centuries)
10 Egypt and the Near East: Fatimids and Mamluks
11 The North-East
12 The Western Sudan (to c. 1600)
13 Lower Guinea
14 The Western and Central Sudan: the nineteenth century
15 Southern Africa: the nineteenth century
16 East and Central Africa: the nineteenth century
Acknowledgements
Part I: Continental perspectives
Perimeters
1 Prelude: Africa and the historians
2 Out of Africa: the precursors
3 Environment, language and art c. 10,000 — c. 500 BCE
4 Producing more food c. 10,000 — c. 500 BCE
5 Copper and iron c. 600 BCE to c. 1000 CE
6 Models: production, power and gender
Part II: Regional histories to the sixteenth century
7 Central Africa
8 Eastern Africa
9 Africa south of the Limpopo
10 Northern Africa to the seventh century CE
11 Northern Africa from the seventh century CE
12 The North-East
13 The Western Sudan
14 West Africa: from the savanna to the sea
Part III: Regional histories to c. 1870
15 Northern Africa
16 The Western Sudan in a time of jihad
17 The Eastern and Central Sudan
18 The Atlantic slave trade
19 West Africa to 1800
20 West Africa 1800 to 1870
21 Central Africa
22 Southern Africa
23 East and East Central Africa
Notes
Some suggestions for further reading
Index
