Africa and World War II

This volume considers the military, economic, and political significance of Africa during World War II. The essays feature new research and innovative approaches to the historiography of Africa and bring to the fore issues of race, gender, and labor during the war, topics that have not yet received much critical attention. It explores the experiences of male and female combatants, peasant producers, women traders, missionaries, and sex workers. The first section offers three introductory essays that give a continent-wide overview of how Africa sustained the Allied effort through labor and resources. The six sections that follow offer individual case studies from different parts of the continent. Contributors offer a macro and micro view of the multiple levels on which Africa's contributions shaped the war as well as the ways in which the war affected individuals and communities and transformed Africa's political, economic, and social landscape.

Author: Judith A. Byfield
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 04/20/2015
Pages: 566
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.95lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 1.40d
ISBN: 9781107053205

Review Citation(s):
Choice 01/01/2016

About the Author
Parsons, Timothy: - Timothy Parsons holds a joint appointment as Professor of African History in the history department and in the African and African American studies program at Washington University, St Louis, where he also directs the international and area studies program. His primary publications include The Rule of Empires: Those Who Built Them, Those Who Endured Them, and Why They Always Fall (2010), Race, Resistance and the Boy Scout Movement in British Colonial Africa (2004), and The 1964 Army Mutinies and the Making of Modern East Africa (2003).Byfield, Judith A.: - Judith A. Byfield is Associate Professor of History at Cornell University, teaching African and Caribbean history. She is coeditor of Gendering the African Diaspora: Women, Culture and Historical Change in the Caribbean and Nigerian Hinterland (2010) and author of The Bluest Hands: A Social and Economic History of Women Indigo Dyers in Western Nigeria, 1890-1940 (2002). She is a former president of the African Studies Association (2011) and is on the editorial board of the Blacks in the Diaspora series.Brown, Carolyn A.: - Carolyn A. Brown is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. She is the author of We Are All Slaves: African Miners, Culture, and Resistance at the Enugu Government Colliery, Nigeria, 1914-1950 (2001). She is coeditor, with Paul Lovejoy, of Repercussions of the Atlantic Slave Trade: The Interior of the Bight of Biafra and the African Diaspora (2010). She is on the editorial board of Cambridge University Press's Africa Studies series and is a senior editor of the labor journal International Labor and Working Class History.
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