New Books In African Studies

In his book Colonial Buganda and the End of Empire: Political Thought and Historical Imagination in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Dr. Jonathon Earle illustrates the rich and diverse intellectual history of Buganda, an East African kingdom that came to be incorporated into the modern state of Uganda.  Earle constructs the intellectual biographies of four important Ganda activists who articulated and debated ideas about kingship, political pluralism, citizenship, and justice. Their views on state and society were drawn from a diverse range of sources such as religious texts, classical political thinkers and local histories. Earle’s book shows that often used distinctions between “sacred” and “secular” or “African” and “European” oversimplify and obscure what was a more pluralistic intellectual milieu.  In writing this book, Earle uses a wide range of primary and secondary sources among which are several private archival collections that had not been previously available to historians. The book is c