History of Central Africa

The History of Central Africa provides, in two volumes, the first major integrated history of one of the largest regions of the tropical world. It covers the four colonial zones demarcated by Britain, France, Belgium and Portugal from before the advent of the iron ages until the late twentieth century.

In this second volume attention is focused on colonial and post-colonial history. The unity of historical experience was in some ways broken in the four-way partition by the colonial power, but the authors demonstrate that the policies adopted by the main colonisers share a surprising degree of uniformity; this common heritage enables Central Africas twentieth-century history, thorough to independence and beyond, to be seen as an integrated whole rather than as a cluster of local experiences.