slavery
The Battle for the Past
For the last decade, the question of who gets to interrogate historical questions, and why they are motivated to do so, has become very fraught in Britain. The topics that have become most central to this controversy are the British Empire, British imperialism, and ideas about race, identity and belonging in the British nation.
A Tale of Two Omars
Western scholarly approaches tend to approach African and Islamic studies in separate lenses: “too Islamic” to be a legitimate subject of study for most anthropologists and Africanists, and “too African” to be of interest to Islamicists, thereby causing African-Muslim scholarly voices to fall through the cracks.
Book Examines African Role in Western Prosperity
Howard French’s new book, “Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War”, serves as a kind of elegy for the cataclysmic effect that contact with Europeans had on African societies, many of whose monarchs were enthusiastic participants in the slave trade before the Europeans arrived but with considerable differences to how it later became known.