Over the last fifty years, Roland Oliver has been both a witness to the post-colonial history of Africa and a preeminent scholar of the continent s pre-colonial history. Oliver was a young Cambridge graduate in 1947 when he took a newly created position at the University of London to research, and eventually teach, the pre-colonial history of Africa. Seeking from the outset to establish a unified conception of African history free from European frameworks, Oliver and his colleague John Fage went on to write the influential "A Short History of Africa," found the "Journal of African History,"...

Africa in the Iron Age is a comprehensive and authoritative introduction to African history between about 500 B.C. and A.D. 1400. The authors are not so much concerned with a particular technological revolution as the enormous changes - political, social and economic - that took place during the period 500 B.C.-A.D. 1400 all over the African continent. The book falls into three parts. Early chapters describe conditions about 500 B.C. when North Africa is already in the Bronze Age, Middle Africa is engaged in Stone Age farming and south of the Sahara most men live by hunting and gathering...

This radically revised and updated companion volume to the authors' well-known Africa since 1800 (now in its fourth edition) takes African history from about 1250 AD, when African societies were expanding their political and economic scope, and when Islamic influences were already reaching across the Sahara and down the Indian Ocean coastline. It continues through the period of early European contact from the fifteenth century onward, with much emphasis on expanding Atlantic trade.

This title reveals Oliver's efforts from the 1940s to the 1980s to train and foster African graduate students to teach in African universities; his role in bringing together the work of historians and archaeologists from Europe and Africa; his encounters with Africans; and the political and economic upheavals of Africa he encountered.

The core of the book is Oliver's account of his research travels throughout tropical Africa from the 1940s to the 1980s.

This masterpiece of scholarship and compression, the second edition of The African Experience, covers the entire span of human history across the African continent, from the earliest emergence of hominids in eastern and southern Africa up to the present day. Drawing on more than forty years of teaching and research, Professor Oliver arranges the book thematically, beginning with the human colonization of the different regions of Africa, the origins of food production, and the formation of African languages.The achievements of Ancient Egypt are placed in context with the developments in...

This radically revised and updated companion volume to the authors' well-known Africa since 1800 (now in its fourth edition) takes African history from about 1250 AD, when African societies were expanding their political and economic scope, and when Islamic influences were already reaching across the Sahara and down the Indian Ocean coastline. It continues through the period of early European contact from the fifteenth century onward, with much emphasis on expanding Atlantic trade.

The African Middle Ages covers the period of African history from 1400 to 1800.