'Africa in Global History' book launch

Africa in Global History - A Handbook (Edited by Toyin Falola and Mohammed Bashir Salau)

This handbook places emphasis on modern/contemporary times, and offers relevant sophisticated and comprehensive overviews. It aims to emphasize the religious, economic, political, cultural and social connections between Africa and the rest of the world and features comparisons as well as an interdisciplinary approach in order to examine the place of Africa in global history.

About the panel

• Professor Toyin Omoyeni Falola
• Professor Mohammed Bashir Salau
• Dr Flavia Gasbarri 
• Professor Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu
• Dr Pedro Machado
• Dr Jodie Yuzhou Sun

Professor Toyin Omoyeni Falola is a Nigerian historian and professor of African Studies. He is currently the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin.

His research interest is African History since the 19th century in the tradition of the Ibadan School; his geographic areas of interest include Africa, Latin America and the United States; and his thematic fields include Atlantic history, diaspora and migration, empire and globalization, intellectual history, international relations, religion and culture.

Falola is author and editor of more than one hundred books, and he is the general editor of the Cambria African Studies Series (Cambria Press)

Professor Mohammed Bashir Salau received his Ph.D. in Africa diaspora history from York University, Canada, in 2005.

Salau's primary research focuses on Hausaland, Nigeria and other parts of West Africa, mainly nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is the author of two books. The first book, The West African Slave Plantation: A Case Study was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2011. Salau's second book, Plantation Slavery in the Sokoto Caliphate: A Historical and Comparative Study (University of Rochester Press, 2018), is a work of synthesis that engages with major debates on internal African Slavery, on the meaning of the term "plantation," and on comparative slavery.

Dr Flavia Gasbarri is Lecturer in War Studies education at King's and co-Chair of the Africa Research Group

Professor Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu is a Professor of History at University of South Africa and executive director at the South African Democracy Education Trust. He has an MA in History from the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg and a PhD in History from the University of the Witwatersrand.

His book publications include The Soweto Uprisings: Counter-Memories of June 1976 (Picador Africa, 2017) and King Dingane ka Senzangakhona: The Second Monarch of the Zulu Kingdom (Palgrave Macmillan). He is co-author of The Thabo Mbeki I Know (Picador Africa, 2016) and also co-author of Public History and Culture in South Africa: Memorialisation and Liberation Heritage Sites in Johannesburg and the Township Space (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). He is the editor-in-chief of The Road to Democracy in South Africa, a multi-volume series.

Dr Pedro Machado is a global and Indian Ocean historian with interests in commodity histories, labour and migratory movements, and the social, cultural, environmental and commercial trajectories of objects. He is based at Indiana University, Bloomington, and is the author of several works, among which are Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c. 1750-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2014); Textile Trades, Consumer Cultures and the Material Worlds of the Indian Ocean (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); and Pearls, People and Power: Pearling and Indian Ocean Worlds (Ohio University Press, 2020).

He is currently at work on a global history of pearl shell collection and exchange while also developing research on eucalyptus and colonial forestry in the Portuguese empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Dr Jodie Yuzhou Sun is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of History at Fudan University, China and a research fellow at the International Studies Group at University of the Free State, South Africa. Her research interests are China-Africa relations, Cold War history in the global South and global history of socialist ideas.

She has published in Cold War History, International Journal of African Historical Studies and Journal of Southern African Studies. Her monograph, entitled Kenya and Zambia’s Relations with China, is to be published by James Currey.