In a vast and all-embracing study of Africa, from the origins of mankind to the present day, John Iliffe refocuses its history on the peopling of an environmentally hostile continent. Africans have been pioneers struggling against disease and nature, but during the last century their inherited culture has interacted with medical progress to produce the most rapid population growth the world has ever seen. This new edition incorporates genetic and linguistic findings, throwing light on early African history and summarises research that has transformed the study of the Atlantic slave trade. It also examines the consequences of a rapidly growing youthful population, the hopeful but uncertain democratisation and economic recovery of the early twenty-first century, the containment of the AIDS epidemic and the turmoil within Islam that has produced the Arab Spring. Africans: The History of a Continent is thus a single story binding modern men and women to their earliest human ancestors.

Author: John Iliffe
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 08/29/2017
Series: African Studies #137
Pages: 414
Weight: 1.7lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.30w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9781107198326
3rd Revised Edition


Review Citation(s):
Choice 04/01/2018

About the Author
Iliffe, John: - John Iliffe was Professor of African History at the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow of St John's College. He is the author of several books on Africa including A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge, 1979) and The African Poor: A History (Cambridge, 1988), which was awarded the Herskovits Prize of the African Studies Association of the United States.