On the Fringes of History: A Memoir (review)

Following the autobiographies of Jan Vansina and Roland Oliver, Philip Curtin has now published an account of his life in association with African and world history.

Naturally, having been preceded by two colossi, Curtin set himself a hard task to follow; unfortunately, he has not lived up to the task, and one cannot but help feel that there could have been much more. Indeed, the book feels out of balance. The first sections, detailing Curtin's family background and his early years, are well-written and thorough, but the later sections of the book leave the impression that Curtin was writing to a deadline and merely wanted to finish off what had become a tedious task.

Born to well-to-do parents who were college graduates, Curtin spent his early years in West Virginia, regularly visited his mother's family in Philadelphia, visited Miami and Cuba in 1934, and undertook a European tour at the age of fifteen. In 1940, he traveled to Peru as part of a program known as Experiment in International Living. The trip, which included a visit to Machu Picchu, deeply influenced him and led to "a general reorientation of my thinking about the world. . . . Latin America was not merely a Spanish-speaking version of the United States" (p. 33). In 1941, after a second Latin American trip, to Colombia, Curtin entered Swarthmore College, his parents' alma mater. Upon graduating, he entered the U.S. Maritime Service as a radio officer—a position that allowed for extensive reading, plus travel to Europe and Asia. At the end of the war, he entered into the first of his three marriages. In graduate studies at Harvard, he changed the emphasis of his reading in European history and "began to read as much as possible about the impact of Europe on the world overseas" (p. 55). At Harvard, he completed a dissertation, later to appear as Two Jamaicas, which centered on the intellectual response to emancipation in Jamaica, and he returned to Swarthmore to take up a teaching post.

Teaching at Swarthmore, Curtin came to realize that "many questions that are worth asking of history have no really satisfactory answers" (p. 67). He developed the course "Expansion of Europe," which dealt with the interaction between Europe and the rest of the world—a course that he would continue to teach right up to his retirement, in 1998. Over time, its title changed, as did its emphasis, which shifted from being Europe-centered to focusing on "the non-European side of things" (p. 68); the course proved to be the seedbed for six of Curtin's later books. In 1954, as his first marriage started to come apart, he began developing a new research topic, one that dealt with British understandings of sub-Saharan Africa. Through teaching his daughter at Swarthmore, Curtin was introduced to Melville Herskovits, who "explained the unwritten ground rules for academic travel in West Africa" (p. 71), and wrote letters of introduction to Kwame Nkrumah, Nnamdi Azikiwe, and others. Herskovits "made it possible for me to visit West Africa as a possibly important American Africanist, not a mere assistant professor" (p. 72).

A two-month whirlwind tour to West Africa on the eve of colonial rule in 1955 included visits to what would later become Ghana, Togo, Senegal, Burkina Faso, and Nigeria. It was, as Curtin rightly observes, his "first intense immersion in African studies generally." It was, furthermore, "an ideal background for setting up an African studies program at an American University" (p. 90). Upon returning to the United States, Curtin divorced and moved to the history department in Madison, Wisconsin, where, almost immediately, he laid the foundations for a famed African-studies program. In 1958, with funding from the Ford Foundation, he set off with his second wife on a Land Rover tour of Africa that started in Morocco and ended in Kenya—a trip that was "probably easier and safer in 1958–59 than it has been at...