Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic

Series Editors’ Preface

vii Series Editors’ Preface The University of Cambridge is home to one of the world’s leading centers of African studies. It organizes conferences, runs a weekly seminar series, hosts a specialist library, and coordinates the work of the several dozen Cambridge lecturers whose research concerns Africa. With the generous support of the Leverhulme Trust, the center has recently inaugurated the Cambridge/Africa Collaborative Research Programme. Each year the center announces a fellowship competition organized around a particular theme and invites applications from Africa-based scholars. Four or five fellows are brought to Cambridge for six months, during which time they pursue research on separate projects while meeting regularly to discuss their work. At the conclusion of their tenure, the visiting fellows present the fruits of their labors at two conferences, one in Cambridge, the other at a partner African institution. This book is the first installment in a new Cambridge Centre of African Studies Series, published by Ohio University Press.The series will publish edited volumes arising chiefly out of the body of scholarship generated by the Cambridge/Africa Collaborative Research Programme. These books will highlight the work that young, promising African scholars have composed and refined over the course of their time in Cambridge. The books will also feature the work of European or American Africanists who have offered papers at conferences and seminars convened in Cambridge. Contributors will have been involved in a yearlong conversation about the themes in which each book is engaged.This long period of incubation will, we hope, allow us to produce books that are both thematically coherent and methodologically innovative, full of fresh, cutting-edge research from scholars who are excited about their work. Academicpressestodayfacegrowingfinancialpressures,anditisincreasingly difficult to find a publisher for the fruit of collaborative research. We thank the editors at Ohio for their support in fostering a more dialogical, more democratic approach to the production of knowledge about Africa. Derek R. Peterson Harri Englund Christopher Warnes Cambridge, England ...