Bruce Hall’s book A History of Race in Muslim West Africa, 1600-1960 is the co-winner of this year’s Martin A. Klein Award for the best book in African History by the American Historical Association.
Drawing on a wide variety of sources, the author demonstrates the ways in which arguments about race have structured social and political hierarchies in the Niger Bend since the seventeenth century, well before the French colonized the region in the nineteenth century. Hall’s book is a particularly effective blending of intellectual history and cultural anthropology, and is essential reading for all those who hope to understand the deep historical background to the on-going conflicts and civil wars in present-day Mali.
History
