What was African like in the mid-1800s

The course aims to introduce students to the on-going profound and diverse changes that the African continent experienced and the equally complex responses from men and women, young and old during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Exploring the wide-ranging debates about the origins of modern Africa, the course seeks to equip students with critical analytical tools with which to understand its complex pasts and Africa's place in world history and in the contemporary world. The course explores diverse encounters between African societies and the world since 1800 and stresses the complex ways in which diverse Africans engaged and came to terms with these historical forces and their complex outcomes. The course focus will include the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, colonial conquest and rule, socio-economic changes and the decolonisation process. Through a selection of regional case studies, the course will cover the entire continent so as to understand the diversity of the historical forces that have shaped contemporary Africa.