This article examines the history of Daisyfield School, an Afrikaner children’s orphanage and school in Southern Rhodesia. The existence of an Afrikaner school in a self-consciously British settler colony represented a distinctive settler project within the settler state, one supported by the school’s transnational connections and one whose aims o…[Read more]

In January 2004, residents of Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, were treated to a disturbing sight. Over 200 members of the governing Movement for Multiparty Democracy party marched through the streets of the capital carrying a mock coffin bearing the name of Roy Clarke, a prominent newspaper satirist and white British national who had been a permanent r…[Read more]

The case of Joao Pereira da Cunha and Catarina Juliana provides insights on over two centuries of creolization in Central Africa. The detailed proceedings describe patterns of cultural and religious life that were common and popular in Angola in the eighteenth century. People were not normally punished for this type of behavior and did not get…[Read more]

This article shows how the image of Africa as a continent burdened by slave trade and warfare evolved in Finland during the nineteenth century.

Essay-review on Robert B. Rakove, ‘Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Dr Rakove’s response to my review can be read here: https://networks.h-net.org/node/19474/discussions/42201/robert-b-rakoves-response-simon-stevenss-review-kennedy-johnson-and.

Stevens reviews Ryan Irwin’s ‘Gordian Knot: Apartheid and the Unmaking of the Liberal World Order’ (2012) and Rob Skinner’s ‘The Foundations of Anti-Apartheid: Liberal Humanitarians and Transnational Activists in Britain and the United States, c. 1919–64’ (2010), two of the first published studies from an emerging stream of more detached and criti…[Read more]

Why did leaders of the Congress movement in South Africa abandon their exclusive reliance on non-violent means in the struggle against apartheid, form an armed unit (Umkhonto we Sizwe), and launch a campaign of spectacular sabotage bombings of symbols of apartheid in 1961? None of the earlier violent struggles from which Congress leaders drew…[Read more]

The Congress movement in South Africa was transformed in the early 1960s from a movement committed to the exclusive use of non-violent means in the struggle against apartheid to one focused on rural guerrilla warfare as a free-standing and sufficient first step towards ‘all-out war’ and the armed seizure of power. But few, if any, of the par…[Read more]

Transnational mobility was characteristic of the profession of mining engineer in the early twentieth century and the skills required in this profession encompassed both wide-ranging technical competencies and labour management, which clearly was racialized.

The chapter uses these two features of the profession of mining engineer to make two…[Read more]