Overview

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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Judith A. Byfield (Cornell University, New York) ,  Carolyn A. Brown ,  Timothy Parsons (Washington University, St Louis) ,  Ahmad Alawad Sikainga (Ohio State University)
Publisher:   Cambridge University Press
Imprint:   Cambridge University Press
Edition:   New edition
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 3.20cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.880kg
ISBN:  

9781107053205

ISBN 10:   110705320
Pages:   566
Publication Date:   20 April 2015
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  College/higher education ,  Professional & Vocational ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
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Table of Contents

1. The experiences of ordinary Africans in World War II T. Parsons; 2. Producing for the war J. A. Byfield; 3. African labor in the making of World War II C. Brown; 4. The military, race, and resistance: the conundrums of recruiting black South African men during the Second World War L. Grundlingh; 5. The Moroccan 'effort de guerre' in World War II D. Maghraoui; 6. Free to coerce: forced labor during and after the Vichy years in French West Africa C. B. Ash; 7. No country fit for heroes: the plight of disabled Kenyan veterans T. Parsons; 8. Women, rice, and war: political and economic crisis in war-time Abeokuta (Nigeria) J. A. Byfield; 9. Africa's 'battle for rubber' in the Second World War W. G. Clarence-Smith; 10. Freetown and World War II: strategic militarization, accommodation, and resistance A. M. Howard; 11. Free France, unfree Africa: extraction and labor in French Equatorial Africa under free French rule E. T. Jennings; 12. The Portuguese African colonies and World War II M. Newitt; 13. Pit sawyers, rubber tappers, and forest farmers: World War II and the transformation of the Tanzanian forests T. Sunseri; 14. Wrestling with race on the eve of human rights: British management of the color line in post-fascist Eritrea G. Barrera; 15. To be treated as a man: masculinity, race, and the imperial state in the Nigerian coal industry C. Brown; 16. 'A white man's war': settler masculinity in the Union Defense Force, 1939–45 S. Chetty; 17. African soldiers, French women, and colonial fears during and after World War II R. Ginio; 18. World War II and the sex trade in British West Africa C. Ray; 19. American missions in war-time French West Africa B. M. Cooper; 20. Fighting fascism: Ethiopian women patriots 1935–41 H. Habtu and J. A. Byfield; 21. Defending the land of their ancestors: African American military experience in Africa during World War II D. Hutchinson; 22. French African soldiers in German POW camps, 1940–5 R. Scheck; 23. Resistance and mobilization: Guinea and World War II E. Schmidt; 24. Sudanese response to World War II A. Sikainga; 25. Uganda after World War II C. Summers; 26. Consequences of the war A. Sikainga.

Reviews

This book offers a very substantial contribution to an understanding of both the significant role of African peoples and resources in Allied victory in World War II and of the impact of the war on the peoples of the continent. Gerhard L. Weinberg, Professor Emeritus, University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Author Information

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. 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. 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). Ahmad Alawad Sikainga is Professor of History at the Ohio State University. He is the author of City of Steel and Fire: A Social History of Atbara, Sudan's Railway Town, 1906–1984 (2002), Slaves into Workers: Emancipation and Labor in Colonial Sudan (1996), Western Bahr al-Ghazal under British Rule, 1898–1956 (1990), and Sudan Defense Force: Origin and Role, 1925–1955 (1983). He is coeditor of Post-War Reconstruction in Africa (2006) and Civil War in Sudan (1993).

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