Böcker av Christopher Prior

This open access book addresses a question fundamental to the histories of empire and Africa: at the point of the colonial encounter, how was knowledge made? How did different communities, with little or no prior contact, construct meaning about one another? Amidst huge changes in the politics and economics of a continent, on the cusp of almost complete colonization at the hands of European powers at the end of the nineteenth century, how do the specifics of personality and contingency affect knowledge production? An obvious challenge in addressing this sort of question is the frequent lack of African-produced source material; here, we must work within the 'archives of oppression' and read both along and against the colonial grain in an attempt to restore African agency to this process of knowledge production. Drawing on the previously never-used diaries of explorer Frank Oates, who travelled throughout Matabeleland in the 1870s, the use of a single traveller's experiences in detail affords us the means to consider the fine details of the interactions between Europeans and Africans. Therefore, this study seeks to enhance existing work on race and empire of the nineteenth century by asking: what place do the fragilities, uncertainties, and contingencies of encounters between individuals have in our understanding of how knowledge is made?Christopher Prior is Associate Professor in Colonial and Postcolonial History at the University of Southampton, UK. He has written two monographs on the histories of Britain and Britons in Africa, and the intellectual connections between Africa and Britain, including Edwardian England and the Idea of Racial Decline (Palgrave, 2013). Joseph Higgins is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Modern History at the University of Southampton, UK. He has written on the intellectual histories connecting empire and Britain.

Emerging from a long and exhausting conflict against the Boers in South Africa, Edwardians are often perceived as rocked by a profound set of doubts about the future of the British Empire. Drawing upon a wide range of popular sources, this study considers the level of middle-class engagement with such strains of pessimistic thought.

Looks at the attitudes of colonial officials in Africa who served between the end of the19th century and WWII, as well as what shaped such attitudes, including education and training, interrelationships, infrastructural change, and anti-colonial nationalism. -- .