Bücher von Patrick Manning

The small but important region of Dahomey (now the People's Republic of Benin) has played an active role in the world economy throughout the era of mercantile and industrial capitalism, beginning as an exporter of slaves and becoming an exporter of plain oil and palm kernels. This book covers a span of three centuries, integrating into a single framework the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial economic history of Dahomey. Mr Manning has pieced together an extensive body of new evidence and new interpretations: he has combined descriptive evidence with quantitative data on foreign trade, slave demography and colonial government finance, and has used both Marxian and Neoclassical techniques of economic analysis. He argues that, despite the severe strain on population and economic growth caused by the slave trade, the economy continued to expand from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, and the colonial state acted as an economic depressant rather than a stimulant.

This book presents a concise yet comprehensive survey of methods used in the expanding studies of human evolution, paying particular attention to new work on social evolution.

World history has expanded dramatically in recent years, primarily as a teaching field, and increasingly as a research field. But good teaching also requires advanced training for teachers, and access to a stream of new research from scholars trained as world historians.

This edition of Patrick Manning's established text includes two new chapters that discuss developments in the region since 1985, emphasising the democratisation movements of the 1980s and 1990s, the Francophone movement, and the crises in Rwanda and Burundi. Focusing on the French-speaking countries of west and central Africa, the book brings out the way in which the precolonial African heritage shaped new societies, in interaction with French and Belgian colonial rules, and with global economic and cultural forces. Three eras of change are described: the transition to colonial rule from 1880 to 1940, the transition to independent states from 1940 to 1985, and the reconfiguration of post-colonial society after 1985. The first edition of this book has been widely used in courses in African studies and African history.

This book summarizes a wide range of recent literature on slavery for all of tropical Africa. It analyzes the demography, economics, social structure, and ideology of slavery in Africa from the beginning of large-scale exports in the seventeenth century to the gradual elimination of slavery in the twentieth century.