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African History seeks to publish scholarly writing on the history of Africa. It welcomes submissions on the history of any part of the continent and its islands. Works could range from the earliest epochs through to the recent past. Particularly welcome are studies that bring to light new archival materials, offer new interpretations of established sources or arguments, and that are interdisciplinary in method but historically-grounded.

We are keen to have the publications in this series widely available on the African continent and therefore pursue co-publishing arrangements with local publishers.


The aim of African Sources for African History is to establish a series of critical editions of indigenous African narrative sources for the history of sub-Saharan Africa, accessible to scholars and students in Africa and elsewhere. African Sources for African History intends to give African viewpoints a more central place in the writing of African history, by making African perspectives more easily available. Its stress on indigenous African sources is also hoped to inspire individual researchers to search actively for African sources and to make these available to the wider academic community.

Winner of the 2016 Conover-Porter Award. The prize is awarded by the African Studies Association (ASA) to Outstanding Africa-related reference works, bibliographies or bibliographic essays published in any country, separately or as part of a larger work.

The Writings of Mauritania and the Western Sahara compiles 300 years of literary production, in excess of 10,000 titles by over 1800 authors,who document a vibrant Islamic culture and educational system in a Bedouin society lacking any overarching state. This contradicts our received wisdom about the nature of high Islamic scholarship, and it offers insights into complicated relationships between the authority of the Word and quotidian life in nomadic society. Biographical profiles of the writers and analyses of significant works tell a story of the organic growth of a Saharan scholarly tradition, linked but largely independent of the heartlands, original in its Hassaniyya verse and extensive legal literature, deeply rooted in its Islamic culture.
Europe, Africa and the Americas, 1500-1830
Series Editors: and
The explosion of boundaries that took place in the early modern period—cultural and intellectual, no less than social and political—is the subject of this exciting series that explores the meeting of peoples, products, ideas, and traditions in the early modern Americas, Africa, and Europe. The Atlantic World provides a forum for scholarly work—original monographs, article collections, editions of primary sources translations—on these exciting global mixtures and their impact on culture, politics and society in the period bridging the original Columbian "encounter" and the abolition of slavery. It moves away from traditional historiographical emphases that isolate continents and nation-states and toward a broader terrain that includes non-European perspectives. It also encourages a wider disciplinary approach to early modern studies. Themes will include the commerce of ideas and products; the exchange of religions and traditions; the institution of slavery; the transfer of technologies; the development of new forms of political, social and economic policy. It welcomes studies that employ diverse forms of analysis and from all scholarly disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, art history, history (including the history of science), linguistics, literature, music, philosophy, and religious studies.

Manuscripts (preferably in English) should be 90,000 to 180,000 words in length and may include illustrations. The editors would be interested to receive proposals for specialist monographs and syntheses but may also consider multi-authored contributions such as conference proceedings and edited volumes, as well as thematic works and source translations.
Historical Implications of Linguistic and Archaeological Parallels
Author:
In The Amorite Dynasty of Ugarit Mary Buck takes a new approach to the field of Amorite studies by considering whether the site of Ugarit shares close parallels with other sites and cultures known from the Bronze Age Levant. When viewed in conjunction, the archaeological and linguistic material uncovered in this study serves to enhance our understanding of the historical complexity and diversity of the Middle Bronze Age period of international relations at the site of Ugarit.
With a deft hand, Dr. Buck pursues a nuanced view of populations in the Bronze Age Levant, with the objective of understanding the ancient polity of Ugarit as a kin-based culture that shares close ties with the Amorite populations of the Levant.

"The author covers a contentious area of scholarship with confidence and competence, and has produced a convincing case for the Amorite origins of Bronze Age Ugarit."
-Nick Wyatt, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 44.5 (2020)

The Studies in the Archaeology and History of the Levant series publishes volumes from the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East. Other series offered by Brill that publish volumes from the Museum include Harvard Semitic Studies and Harvard Semitic Monographs, https://hmane.harvard.edu/publications.
Author:
In The Catechumenate in Late Antique Africa (4th-6th centuries) Matthieu Pignot explores how individuals became Christian in ancient North Africa. Before baptism, converts first became catechumens and spent a significant time of gradual integration into the community through rituals and teaching. This book provides the first historical study of this process in African sources, from Augustine of Hippo, to canon of councils, anonymous sermons and 6th-century letters. Pignot shows that practices varied more than is generally assumed and that catechumens, because of their liminal position, were a disputed and essential group in the development of Christian communities until the 6th century at least. This book demonstrates that the catechumenate is key to understanding the processes of Christianisation and conversion in the West.
Letters from a Danish Planter in German East Africa 1888-1906
This book provides a rare opportunity to follow the daily life on and around plantations and towns in the first years of the German colonial presence in East Africa, as seen through the eyes of a Danish master farmer working for the German East Africa Company. There are few memoirs and personal letters from these years, and existent letters are primarily by explorers, colonial officials, missionaries or the occasional settler. Lautherborn's material provides one of the very few entry points into the daily business of colonial expansion and consolidation in the early years of German East Africa as seen through the eyes of a practical man trying to do a job in a complex and changing world.
Amyrtaeus, only pharaoh of the Twenty-eighth Dynasty, shook off the shackles of Persian rule in 404 BCE; a little over seventy years later, Ptolemy son of Lagus started the ‘Greek millennium’ (J.G. Manning’s phrase) in Egypt―living long enough to leave a powerful kingdom to his youngest son, Ptolemy II, in 282.
In this book, expert studies document the transformation of Egypt through the dynamic fourth century, and the inauguration of the Ptolemaic state. Ptolemy built up his position as ruler subtly and steadily. Continuity and change marked the Egyptian-Greek encounter. The calendar, the economy and coinage, the temples, all took on new directions. In the great new city of Alexandria, the settlers’ burial customs had their own story to tell.
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Were the Dutch-Africans in southern Africa a brother nation to the Dutch or did they simply represent a lost colony? Connecting primary sources in Dutch and Afrikaans, this work tells the story of the Dutch stamverwantschap (kinship) movement between 1847 and 1900. The white Dutch-Africans were imagined to be the bridgehead to a broader Dutch identity – a ‘second Netherlands’ in the south. This study explores how the 19th century Dutch identified with and idealised a pastoral community operating within a racially segregated society on the edge of European civilisation. When the stamverwantschap dream collided with British military and economic power, the belief that race, language and religion could sustain a broader Dutch identity proved to be an illusion.