Colonialism and Its Critics
The books that documented the conquest, the slave trade, and the plunder of a continent, and the critics who took apart the ideas used to justify them.
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
Walter Rodney
Development and underdevelopment were two sides of one coin, minted in Europe.
Read why it mattered →King Leopold's Ghost
Adam Hochschild
A king who never set foot in the Congo turned it into a private slaughterhouse for rubber.
Read why it mattered →Discourse on Colonialism
Aime Cesaire
Colonization, he wrote, works to decivilize the colonizer.
Read why it mattered →Black Skin, White Masks
Frantz Fanon
He began with the wound that colonialism leaves inside the mind.
Read why it mattered →The Colonizer and the Colonized
Albert Memmi
Two figures locked in a single, deforming relationship that neither could leave.
Read why it mattered →The Scramble for Africa
Thomas Pakenham
In barely three decades a few European powers carved up a continent.
Read why it mattered →Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad
The best-known novel of empire, and the most fiercely contested.
Read why it mattered →An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness
Chinua Achebe
Conrad, Achebe charged, was a thoroughgoing racist, and the canon had refused to see it.
Read why it mattered →Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present
Frederick Cooper
The present is not a blank slate; it is the past still at work.
Read why it mattered →Exterminate All the Brutes
Sven Lindqvist
The phrase is Kurtz's; Lindqvist followed it to its end in genocide.
Read why it mattered →More from the library