Africa

Andrew Boxer demonstrates the ways in which external events affected the struggles of African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s.

Michael Scott-Baumann explains why Nasser is such an important figure in the Middle East in the twentieth century.

Emma Christopher analyses the recent treatment of the sensitive issue of slavery and abolition, both by historians and popular culture at large.

Little remains of the great North African empire that was Rome's most formidable enemy, because, as Richard Miles explains, only its complete annihilation could satisfy its younger rival.

In 1959 Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba after a masterly campaign of guerrilla warfare. Drawing on this success, Castro and his followers, including Che Guevara, sought to spread their revolution, as Clive Foss explains.

For centuries, Africans were shipped to the Indian subcontinent and sold as slaves to regional rulers. Rosie Llewellyn-Jones tells the story of those who went to Lucknow to serve the Nawab of Oudh and who joined the Indian Mutiny when he was deposed by the British. For this allegiance their descendants, whom she has traced, still pay a price.

On the eve of the Second World War, the navies of Italy, France and Britain plotted for supremacy in the Mediterranean. Their actions resulted in the fracturing of the sea’s age-old unity, with consequences that persist to this day. Simon Ball explains how the ‘Middle Sea’ became the Middle East.

White South Africans who fought in the long ‘Border War’ to maintain apartheid now find themselves in a country run by their former enemies. Gary Baines examines their continuing struggle to come to terms with the conflict and their efforts to have their voices heard.

Tony Chafer examines the paradoxes and complexities that underlie belated recognition of the contribution of African soldiers to the liberation of France in 1944.

Britain’s first Anti-Slavery Act was ineffective, says Marika Sherwood – British slave traders found ways around it to carry on their profitable activities, while British commerce flourished through the import of slave-grown cotton.

Kevin Shillington looks at the impact on Africa of the slave trade, and its abolition 200 years ago this month.

This West African state was a focus of the slave trade for centuries, and the first African colony to win independence, exactly fifty years ago. Graham Gendall Norton finds lots of history to explore.