This text offers a critique and reappraisal, presenting a series of case studies which trace how the expansion process evolved over the course of modern West-Central African and Western European history. Framed around the issue of Euro-centrism, the author brings together contemporary world history, historical sociology, and English school scholarship to take the study further back in history and place African international relations at the centre of inquiry.

This book explores the West-Central African role in, and experience during, the expansion of international society.

Building upon theoretical contributions from the English School of international relations, historical sociology and sociology, it departs from Euro-centric assumptions by analysing how West-Central Africa and West-Central Africans were integral to the ways in which Europe and Africa came together from the fifteenth century through to the twentieth. Initially, diverse scholarship concerned with the expansion of international society is examined, revealing how the...