The Kingdom of Bunyoro's story demonstrates convincingly that environmental change there was not a uniform, statewide process. In one of the first studies of the political ecology of a major African kingdom, Crisis & Decline in Bunyoro addresses state capacity, ideology, and government legitimacy as crucial issues. Shane Doyle particularly focuses on the interplay between levels of environmental activity within a highly stratified society. Political ecology was as much about the differential impact of conflict on society as it was about the uneven extraction and distribution of resources.The...

African Underclass examines the social, political, and administrative repercussions of rapid urbanization in colonial Dar es Salaam, and the evolution of official policy that viewed urbanization as inextricably linked with social disorder. This policy marginalized numbers of young Africans entering the town---and thus, paradoxically, the policy itself subverted the colonial order. "Well researched and sharply written---one of the best and most stimulating accounts of urbanization in Eastern Africa to have been produced in recent years."---John McCracken, emeritus professor of history,...

For centuries, Kenya s game-laden plains and forests were the rewarding hunting grounds of her native African population. Black Poachers, White Hunters traces the history of hunting there in the colonial era, describing the British attempt to impose the practices and values of nineteenth-century European aristocratic hunts. This both created and enforced an image of African inferiority and subordination. Ultimately conservationists came to claim sovereignty over African wildlife, completing the transformation of indigenous hunters into criminal poachers and seeking to eliminate them...

The twentieth-century history of Njombe, the Southern Highlands district of Tanzania, can aptly be summed up as exclusion within incorporation. Njombe was marginalized even as it was incorporated into the colonial economy. Njombe s people came to see themselves as excluded from agricultural markets, access to medical services, schooling in short, from all opportunity to escape the impoverishing trap of migrant labor."

The double-sided nature of African nationalism its capacity to inspire expressions of unity, and its tendency to narrow political debate are explored by sixteen historians, focusing on the experience of Tanzania. The narrative of the nation of Tanzania, which was created by the anticolonial nationalist movement, expanded by the Union after the Zanzibar Revolution, and fused by the ideology of Ujamaa by Julius Nyerere, has shaped Tanzanian political discourse for decades, but has not obliterated the great wealth of political discourses and identities which exist within the nation."

Since 1991, Ethiopia has gone further than any other country in using ethnicity as the fundamental organizing principle of a federal system of government. And yet this pioneering experiment in ethnic federalism has been largely ignored in the growing literature on democratization and ethnicity in Africa and on the accommodation of ethnic diversity in democratic states. "Ethnic Federalism" brings a much-needed comparative dimension to the discussion of this experiment in Ethiopia.
"Ethnic Federalism" closely examines aspects of the Ethiopean case and asks why the use ofterritorial...

This study examines the complex history of slavery in EastAfrica, focusing on the area that came under German colonial rule.In contrast to the policy pursued at the time by other colonial powersin Africa, the German authorities did not legally abolish slavery in theircolonial territories. However, despite government efforts to keep the institutionof slavery alive, it significantly declined in Tanganyika in the periodconcerned. The book highlights the crucial role played by the slaves in theprocess of emancipation.Author Jan-Georg Deutsch explores the rise of slavery in Tanganyika in thesecond...

Kigezi, a district in southwestern Uganda, is exceptional in many ways. In contrast to many other parts of the colonial world, this district did not adopt cash crops. Soil conservation practices were successfully adopted, and the region maintained a remarkably developed and individualized land market from the early colonial period.
Grace Carswell presents a comprehensive study of livelihoods in Kigezi. Following the lead of groundbreaking studies by Tiffen, Fairhead, and Leach, her case study confirms recent research suggesting that the usual assumptions about population pressure,...

"Slavery in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa" looks at the perceptions of one of the main themes of African history: slavery. There was no single form of slavery, and the line between enslaved and nonslave labor was fine. This book challenges the assertion that domestic slavery increased in Africa as the result of the international trade.Slavery in this region was not a uniform phenomenon and the line between enslaved and non-slave labor was fine. Kinship ties could mark the difference between free and unfree labor. Social categories were not always clear-cut and the status of a slave...

In the context of increasing privatization and land reform these case studies reveal how reforms impact on women's rights to land and how these rights are contested or upheld.