The adventures of a 12-year-old African boy sold into slavery by his father to pay off a debt. The setting is East Africa, a place of trade caravans, tribal warfare and the beginnings of European colonization.

This book "departs from conventional European and nation-centered perspectives to take a remarkable look at how empires relied on diversity to shape the global order. Beginning with ancient Rome and China and continuing across Asia, Europe, the Americas, and Africa," the authors "examine empires' conquests, rivalries, and strategies of domination, emphasizing how empires accommodated, created, and manipulated differences among populations."--Jacket....

"Scarred by decades of conflict and occupation, the craggy African nation of Eritrea has weathered the world's longest-running guerrilla war. The dogged determination that secured victory against Ethiopia, its giant neighbor, is woven into the national psyche, the product of a series of cynical foreign interventions. Fascist Italy wanted Eritrea as the springboard for a new, racially pure Roman empire, Britain sold off its industry for scrap, the...

"In this sweeping history, leading Haitian intellectual Jean Casimir argues that the story of Haiti should not begin with the usual image of Saint-Domingue as the richest colony of the eighteenth century. Rather, it begins with a reconstruction of how individuals from Africa, in the midst of the golden age of imperialism, created a sovereign society based on political imagination and a radical rejection of the colonial order, persisting even through...

In the years following Christopher Columbus's expedition, Europeans made homes for themselves in the Americas and pushed out the indigenous peoples already living there. Many popular stories about life in the early American colonies have gotten some facts wrong and left out others altogether. Fact and Fiction of American Colonization dives into the myths about colonization and brings the truth to light.

In Cameroon, plum season is a highly anticipated time of year. But for the narrator of When the Plums Are Ripe, the poet Pouka, the season reminds him of the "time when our country had discovered the root not so much of its own violence as that of the world's own, and, in response, had thrown its sons who at that time were called Senegalese infantrymen into the desert, just as in the evenings the sellers throw all their still-unsold plums into the...