Warfare in African History

Richard J. Reid is Reader in the History of Africa, Department of History, SOAS, at the University of London. He is the author of several books, including Frontiers of Violence in North-East Africa (2011), War in Pre-Colonial Eastern Africa (2007) and Political Power in Pre-Colonial Buganda (2002).

'At long last, we have a scholarly book that effectively integrates the seemingly bewildering array of recent conflicts in Africa into a longer historical narrative about African social life. Admirably synthesizing vast amounts of historical research, Warfare in African History retains great readability, making it an accessible and necessary corrective to simplistic and ahistorical understandings of violent conflict in contemporary Africa. In revealing both the transformative and destructive capacities of warfare across the vast temporal and geographic sweep of African history, this book humanizes Africa's histories of violence. In so doing, it changes how we think about African social, cultural and military history, and opens exciting new avenues towards including Africa in global military histories.' Michelle Moyd, Indiana University

• 1. The contours of violence: environment, economy, and polity in African warfare; 2. Arms in Africa's antiquity: patterns and systems of warfare, to the early second millennium CE; 3. The military foundations of state and society, to c.1600; 4. Destruction and construction, c.1600–c.1800; 5. Transformations in violence: military revolution and the 'long' nineteenth century; 6. Revolutions incomplete: the old and the new in the modern era.