This collection of essays documents the growth of African history as a discipline at the University of Basel since 2001. It thus pays tribute to fourteen years of research and teaching by Patrick Harries at the Department of History and the Centre for African Studies Basel. The Festschrift covers a broad range of topics from mine labour to missionary endeavour and the production of knowledge, reflecting some of his core research interests. The contributions engage with Patrick Harries oeuvre with reference to the authors own scholarship or vice-versa. Some directly address his publications while others take his teaching, correspondence, remarks or intellectual life more broadly as a point of reference. They all pay tribute to a brilliant and inspiring scholar, a great teacher and a kind person.

This collection of essays documents the formative decades of African history across two countries by following the career of a British historian-cum-archivist Paul Jenkins (born 1938 in Sutherland) from West Africa to Central Europe. It retraces his academic path from Ghana to Switzerland while engaging his curiosities in, contributions to, and impact on the development of African history since the 1960s. The volume reflects on Paul’s academic services throughout the 1960s and 1970s, mainly at the University of Ghana (1965–1972) and subsequently at the Basel Mission Archive and University of Basel (1972–2003) in Switzerland – as key sites where he established himself as a teacher and promoter of African history. These episodes led to lasting bonds of intellectual friendships between Paul and an array of inter-/national and -generational scholars of Africa, several of whom are contributing to this volume. Significantly too, the volume highlights the importance of resources Paul curated during the early 1970s, notably his “Abstracts of the Basel Mission’s Gold Coast Correspondences”, through which he increased access to the rich collections of the Basel Mission Archive for scholars of Africa. Altogether, the essays celebrate, engage, interrogate, and push beyond Paul’s numerous past publications and ongoing academic work.

This book explores the life and work of Mary Elizabeth Barber, a British-born settler scientist who lived in the Cape during the nineteenth century. It provides a lens into a range of subjects within the history of knowledge and science, gender and social history, postcolonial, critical heritage and archival studies. The book examines the international importance of the life and works of a marginalized scientist, the instrumentalisation of science to settlers' political concerns and reveals the pivotal but largely silenced contribution of indigenous African experts. Including a variety of material, visual and textual sources, this study explores how these artefacts are archived and displayed in museums and critically analyses their content and silences. The book traces Barber’s legacy across three continents in collections and archives, offering insights into the politics of memory and history-making. At the same time, it forges a nuanced argument, incorporating study of the North and South, the history of science and social history, and the past and the present.

Reflecting emerging scholarship on the entanglement of colonial histories, this book examines British and South African perspectives on, and involvement in, the genocide of the Herero and Nama in German South West Africa from 1904 to 1908. Seeking to present a transnational and trans-colonial perspective on the war imposed by Germany, the book sheds light on Anglo-German relations during ‘native' rebellions and exposes shared experiences of colonial violence. This approach aligns with a new surge of historiography which emphasises the co-operation between colonial powers to maintain order in Africa. The author focuses on British involvement in counter-insurgency efforts, its awareness of the extent of the genocide, and how the Herero-Nama War impacted colonial rule in British territory. The book sheds light on how the British government intentionally managed sensitive information on German colonialism according to the geopolitical needs: While reports were ignored and censored prior to 1914, these became instrumental to Britain’s foreign policy in confiscating Germany’s colonies in 1919. Not only exploring the war years, the book covers the entire period of German colonial rule in Africa (1884-1919), and highlights British and South African perspectives throughout this period. Offering fresh insights on the first genocide of the century, this book builds on a growing body of research into trans-colonialism and contributes to modern German history.

South Africa provides a unique vantage point from which to examine the scientific imagination over the last three centuries, when its position on the African continent made it a staging post for Portuguese, Dutch, and British colonialism. In the eighteenth century, South African plants and animals caught the imagination of visiting Europeans. In the nineteenth century, science became central to imperial conquest, devastating wars, agricultural intensification and the exploitation of rich mineral resources. Scientific work both facilitated, and offered alternatives to, the imposition of segregation and apartheid in the twentieth century. William Beinart and Saul Dubow offer an innovative exploration of science and technology in this complex, divided society. Bridging a range of disciplines from astronomy to zoology, they demonstrate how scientific knowledge shaped South Africa's peculiar path to modernity. In so doing, they examine the work of remarkable individual scientists and institutions, as well as the contributions of leading politicians from Jan Smuts to Thabo Mbeki.

The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History represents an invaluable tool for historians and others in the field of African studies. This collection of essays, produced by some of the finest scholars currently working in the field, provides the latest insights into, and interpretations of, the history of Africa - a continent with a rich and complex past. An understanding of this past is essential to gain perspective on Africa's current challenges, and this accessible and comprehensive volume will allow readers to explore various aspects - political, economic, social, and cultural - of the continent's history over the last two hundred years. Since African history first emerged as a serious academic endeavour in the 1950s and 1960s, it has undergone numerous shifts in terms of emphasis and approach, changes brought about by political and economic exigencies and by ideological debates. This multi-faceted Handbook is essential reading for anyone with an interest in those debates, and in Africa and its peoples. While the focus is determinedly historical, anthropology, geography, literary criticism, political science and sociology are all employed in this ground-breaking study of Africa's past.

David Livingstone's visit to Cambridge in 1857 was seen as much as a scientific event as a religious one. But he was by no means alone among missionaries in integrating mission with science and other fields of research. Rather, many missionaries were remarkable, pioneering polymaths. This collection of essays explores the ways in which late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century missionaries to Africa contributed to various academic disciplines, such as linguistics, ethnography, social anthropology, zoology, medicine, and many more. This volume includes an introductory chapter by the editors and eleven chapters that analyze missionary research and its impact on knowledge about African contexts. Several themes emerge, including many missionaries' positive views of indigenous discourses and the complicated relationship between missionaries and professional anthropologists. Contributors: John Cinnamon Erika Eichholzer Natasha Erlank Deborah Gaitskell Patrick Harries Walima T. Kalusa John Manton David Maxwell John Stuart Dmitri van den Bersselaar Honoré Vinck

The refereed series ZMO-Studien publishes monographs and edited volumes which mirror the interdisciplinary research programme and approach of the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient.

Historically, scientists and experts have played a prominent role in shaping the relationship between Europe and Africa. Starting with travel writers and missionary intellectuals in the 17th century, European savants have engaged in the study of nature and society in Africa. Knowledge about realms of the world like Africa provided a foil against which Europeans came to view themselves as members of enlightened and modern civilisations. Science and technology also offered crucial tools with which to administer, represent and legitimate power relations in a new global world but the knowledge drawn from contacts with people in far-off places provided Europeans with information and ideas that contributed in everyday ways to the scientific revolution and that provided explorers with the intellectual and social capital needed to develop science into modern disciplines at home in the metropole. This book poses questions about the changing role of European science and expert knowledge from early colonial times to post-colonial times. How did science shape understanding of Africa in Europe and how was scientific knowledge shaped, adapted and redefined in African contexts?