David Birmingham

This bold, popularizing synthesis presents a readily accessible introduction to one of the major themes of twentieth-century world history. Between 1922, when self-government was restored to Egypt, and 1994, when nonracial democracy was achieved in South Africa, 54 new nations were established in Africa. Written within the parameters of African history, as opposed to imperial history, this study charts the processes of nationalism, liberation and independence that recast the political map of Africa in these years. Ranging from Algeria in the North, where a French colonial government used armed force to combat Algerian aspirations to home-rule, to the final overthrow of apartheid in the South, this is an authoritative survey that will be welcomed by all students tackling this complex and challenging topic.

The Decolonization of Africa

The Mbundu and Their Neighbours Under the Influence of the Portuguese, 1483-1790

Trade and Conflict in Angola

Valerie Haynes Perry

Software Development on a Leash is designed as a roadmap for experienced developers and architects who are interested in implementing a turbocharged software development process that encourages reuse and innovation. Author David Birmingham's products have been successfully deployed in a variety of venues, including highly complex desktop environments, with rapid turnaround and high-intensity delivery deadlines. This book contrasts the application-centric development approach to the architecture-centric development approach, introducing the concept of the metamorphic superpattern—the capability of a software program to dynamically adapt to changing application requirements without rebuilding the binary executable. Birmingham invites the reader to deploy reusable structural and behavioral building blocks, along with some powerful frameworks to gain immediate traction in any setting. He includes a high-speed multidimensional toolkit to organize and deploy the building blocks, essentially weaving the application together at run-time rather than being hard-wired in program code. Birmingham then ties the building blocks together with structural and behavioral metadata, allowing simple, interpreted macros to drive everything from database access, screen layouts, and many aspects of software development normally embedded directly into the software programand reused! The rapid deployment effect this creates allows developers to perform simple surgical application changes or rapid, sweeping rework/enhancement—without changing compiled software.

Software Development on a Leash

Nkrumah became president of the new Republic of Ghana in 1960, and was the first African statesman to achieve world recognition. This biography chronicles his public accomplishments as he struggled with colonial transition, African nationalism, and pan-Africanism, and relates his personal trials. This revised edition incorporates new material on his retirement years. For general readers and students. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The Father of African Nationalism

Kwame Nkrumah

Professor David Birmingham

Trade and Empire in the Atlantic 1400-1600 provides an accessible and concise introduction to European expansion overseas during the early modern period. It explains why and how seafarers visited the Caribbean, South America and Africa, and looks at the history of the communities that lived around the ocean as they responded to the challenges and opportunities which sea trade opened for them. Historical thinking on the subject of Empire is naturally controversial as is shown by this survey of the first four stages of early Atlantic colonisation from the conquest of the Canary Islands to the creation of slave plantations in Brazil. This history of the Atlantic Empires is an authoritative introduction to an essential topic in world history.

Trade and Empire in the Atlantic 1400-1600

This history by celebrated Africanist David Birmingham begins in 1820 with the Portuguese attempt to create a third, African, empire after the virtual loss of Asia and America. In the nineteenth century the most valuable resource extracted from Angola was agricultural labor, first as privately owned slaves and later as conscript workers. The colony was managed by a few marine officers, by several hundred white political convicts, and by a couple of thousand black Angolans who had adopted Portuguese language and culture. The hub was the harbor city of Luanda which grew in the twentieth century to be a dynamic metropolis of several million people. The export of labor was gradually replaced when an agrarian revolution enabled white Portuguese immigrants to drive black Angolan laborers to produce sugar cane, cotton, maize and above all coffee. During the twentieth century Congo copper supplemented this wealth, by gem-quality diamonds, and by offshore oil. Although much of the countryside retained its dollar-a-day peasant economy, new wealth generated conflict which pitted white against black, north against south, coast against highland, American allies against Russian allies. The generation of warfare finally ended in 2002 when national reconstruction could begin on Portuguese colonial foundations.

A Short History of Modern Angola

The dark years of European fascism left their indelible mark on Africa. As late as the 1970s, Angola was still ruled by white autocrats, whose dictatorship was eventually overthrown by black nationalists who had never experienced either the rule of law or participatory democracy. Empire in Africa takes the long view of history and asks whether the colonizing ventures of the Portuguese can bear comparison with those of the Mediterranean Ottomans or those experienced by Angola's neighbors in the Belgian Congo, French Equatorial Africa, or the Dutch colonies at the Cape of Good Hope and in the Transvaal. David Birmingham takes the reader through Angola's troubled past, which included endemic warfare for the first twenty-five years of independence, and examines the fact that in the absence of a viable neocolonial referee such as Britain or France, the warring parties turned to Cold War superpowers for a supply of guns. For a decade Angola replaced Vietnam as a field in which an international war by proxy was conducted. Empire in Africa explains how this African nation went from colony to independence, how in the 1990s the Cold War legacy turned to civil war, and how peace finally dawned in 2002.

Angola and Its Neighbors

Empire in Africa

Philip J. Havik

Joseph C. Miller

The volume presents studies that range from slave trade in Benguela to European perceptions of colonial urban Luanda, nineteenth-century Portuguese colonial expeditions into the African interior, rubber colonialism in Garenganze/Katanga--Bié--Benguela, rubber trade in the Kongo, the dynamics of go-between societies in Portuguese Guinea, the rule of the Mozambique Company, urbanism in Lourenço Marques, the Angolan Declaration of Independence, UPA politics in northern Angola, and civilian casualties in Angola in 1975-2008. The featured contributions are by Luiz Felipe de Alencastro, Mariana P. Candido, David Birmingham, Beatrix Heintze, John K. Thornton, Jean-Luc Vellut, Jelmer Vos, William Gervase Clarence-Smith, Philip J. Havik, Rosemary E. Galli, Jeanne Marie Penvenne, Douglas L. Wheeler, Inge Brinkman, and Linda M. Heywood.

Portuguese Studies Review, Vol. 19, Nos. 1 and 2 (Special Volume in Memory of Jill Dias, 1944-2008) (ISSN 1057-1515)

A Scholar for All Seasons: Jill Dias

An updated edition of a classic introduction to Portugal's history.

David Birmingham

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