For sale in CIS only! When Sultan Qaboos overthrew his father as ruler of the Persian Gulf state of Oman in 1970, with the help of British advisers, few expected him to survive long. He was unknown to his own population, and the country was poor and...

British anti-slavery, widely seen as a great sacrifice of economic and political capital on the altar of humanitarianism, was in fact profitable, militarily useful, and crucial to the expansion of British power in West Africa. After the slave trade w...

A wide-eyed South African conscript relates his small share of the war in Angola and Namibia in the 1980s. This is not the usual military history, written by a commander armed with facts, nor a researched story of a war or campaign. It is a persona...

In "Bottleneck", anthropologist Caroline Melly uses the problem of traffic bottlenecks to launch a wide-ranging study of mobility in contemporary urban Senegal – a concept that she argues is central to both citizens' and the state's visions of a succ...

Drive the streets of Nairobi and you are sure to see many matatus – colorful minibuses that transport huge numbers of people around the city. Once ramshackle affairs held together with duct tape and wire, matatus today are name-brand vehicles maxed o...

For sale in CIS only! Lebanon can seem a country in the grip of permanent crisis. Political infighting has paralysed its institutions, and its economy is barely treading water, pulled under by the effects of the Syrian Civil War, which has disrupted...

For sale in CIS only! Over the next generation, Sub-Saharan Africa faces three big, inter-related challenges. Its population will double to 2 billion by 2045. By then, more than half of Africans will be living in cities. And this group of mostly you...

For sale in CIS only! In October 1996, a motley crew of ageing Marxists and unemployed youth coalesced to revolt against Mobutu Seso Seko, president of Zaire/Congo since 1965. Backed by a Rwanda-led regional coalition that drew support from Asmara t...

For sale in CIS only! At the turn of the twentieth century, European colonial powers scrambled in Africa for trade, land and political advantage. When the First World War broke out, they were forced to contend with one another not just in trenches o...

For sale in CIS only! A comprehensive history of the Seychelles, this volume traces its periods of colonisation by France and Britain, the immobile years of the twentieth century, the granting of independence in 1976, and the social changes precipit...