Herein readers will find paper-length book reviews and short academic papers covering a broad spectrum of research interests on a range of topics such as politics, warfare, memory and memorialization, counter-terrorism, state-building and good governance among others beyond my sub-Sahara Africa regional specialty.
Expert consultants and intellectuals can learn a lot from their counterparts whose specialized interest covers specific regions of the world. This explains the cross-cutting element of my thematic approach. Although my expertise is in African affairs, the intellectual milieu of these papers goes beyond international borders and covers at least four broad thematic clusters including war and society; labor and political economy; imperial and postcolonial societies; and gender and kinship history.
Generally, people’s attitudes, set of ideas, values, and beliefs, and how they conduct themselves and work for survival and reputation—their sense of purpose, and of being in the world—is determined by the ecological, socio-political and cultural environmental, and ideological circumstances in which they find themselves. Or, as John Lonsdale (2019) eloquently puts it, a people’s foundation of their ethnic culture, their ethnic morality, what he has called “moral ethnicity,” is ... Read more...
A brief historiographical essay based on the following books: Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and Future World Order, 1860-1900 (Princeton: University Press, 2007); Nicoletta F. Gullace, The Blood of Our Sons: Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship During the Great War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Gertrude Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians (New York, Vintage, 1992); Neil Parsons, King Khama, Emperor ... Read more...
Think piece on: M.A Berg, “Commemoration versus Vergangenheitsbewältigung: Contextualizing Austria’s Gedenkjahr 2005” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); R. G. Moeller, “War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany,” in American Historical Review,101/4 (October 1996), 1008-1048; R. Schulze, “The Politics of Memory: Flight and Expulsion of German Populations ... Read more...
| A paper-length book review of Bernard Porter’s The Absent Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain (Oxford University Press, 2004) |
Preamble
Has the Victorian imperial legacy finally caught up with imperial British historiography especially that written by British historians? Has this body of literature ... Read more...
A paper-length book review of Dipesh Chaktabarty’s Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007)
Dipesh Chakrabarty’s book is profound as it is simple although his subject does not lend itself easily to him as a philosopher ... Read more...
