Ismay Milford – författare

As wars of liberation in Africa and Asia shook the post-war world, a cohort of activists from East and Central Africa, specifically the region encompassing present-day Malawi, Zambia, Uganda and mainland Tanzania, asked what role they could play in the global anticolonial landscape. Through the perspective of these activists, Ismay Milford presents a social and intellectual history of decolonisation and anticolonialism in the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing on multi-archival research, she brings together their trajectories for the first time, reconstructing the anticolonial culture that underpinned their journeys to Delhi, Cairo, London, Accra and beyond. Forming committees and publishing pamphlets, these activists worked with pan-African and Afro-Asian solidarity projects, Cold War student internationals, spiritual internationalists and diverse pressure groups. Milford argues that a focus on their everyday labour and knowledge production highlights certain limits of transnational and international activism, opening up a critical - albeit less heroic - perspective on the global history of anticolonial work and thought.

As wars of liberation in Africa and Asia shook the post-war world, a cohort of activists from East and Central Africa, specifically the region encompassing present-day Malawi, Zambia, Uganda and mainland Tanzania, asked what role they could play in the global anticolonial landscape. Through the perspective of these activists, Ismay Milford presents a social and intellectual history of decolonisation and anticolonialism in the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing on multi-archival research, she brings together their trajectories for the first time, reconstructing the anticolonial culture that underpinned their journeys to Delhi, Cairo, London, Accra and beyond. Forming committees and publishing pamphlets, these activists worked with pan-African and Afro-Asian solidarity projects, Cold War student internationals, spiritual internationalists and diverse pressure groups. Milford argues that a focus on their everyday labour and knowledge production highlights certain limits of transnational and international activism, opening up a critical – albeit less heroic – perspective on the global history of anticolonial work and thought.

Histories of environment and histories of technology have moved in exciting, interdisciplinary directions in recent years, with increasing recognition that both environments and technologies are made and remade, gaining meaning only in specific historical settings. With historical scholarship weighted towards examples from the North Atlantic world, this volume provides a collection of grounded case studies from across the modern world that interrogate the relationship between environment and technology in developmental practices and discourses. Development projects have often involved assumptions that humans can create and wield technology to harness, improve or protect the non-human environment. This volume will not simply discredit these assumptions by revealing their nefarious effects on our society and planet, but instead historicise them by locating them within specific power structures and epistemologies. The connections and conversations between dispersed cases raised here point us to more nuanced conclusions about the causes and effects, the objects and subjects of history, in this dynamic interaction between environment, technology, and development.