Africans: The History of a Continent
John Iliffe
A history built on a startling claim: Africa's central problem was too few people, not too many.
Iliffe organizes millennia of African history around one argument: that Africans were the pioneers who colonized an unusually hostile continent, and that their overriding struggle was to build and hold populations against disease, aridity and poor soils. Underpopulation, not overpopulation, shaped institutions from lineage to slavery. The demographic frame gave scholars a continent-wide interpretive spine and made the book a standard survey in African and Western universities alike.
Its legacy. It has run to multiple editions and remains a core university text across the continent.
- Author
- John Iliffe
- First published
- 1995
- Genre
- History
- Theme
- The Continent's Own History
More from The Continent's Own History
- Africa: A Biography of the Continent — John Reader
The continent where humanity began, told from the bedrock up.
- The Lost Cities of Africa — Basil Davidson
The book that put Kush, Aksum and Great Zimbabwe back into world history.
- The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800 — Christopher Ehret
Deep African history reconstructed from the evidence of language itself.
- Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680 — John K. Thornton
Africans as agents, not merely victims, in the making of the Atlantic world.