Department of History | The University of Chicago

Ralph A. Austen is Professor Emeritus of African History. His current research (and limited teaching) focuses on the political economy and cultural dimensions of European overseas expansion (including autobiographical writings by "colonial subjects") and African literature.

Publications

Books
Northwest Tanzania under German and British Rule: Colonial Policy and Tribal Politics, 1889-1939 (New Haven, 1969).
African Economic History: Internal Development and External Dependency. London: James Currey, 1987.
The Elusive Epic: the Narrative of Jeki la Njambe in the Historical Culture of the Cameroon Coast. Atlanta: African Studies Association Press, 1996 [a monograph and translated texts].
with Jonathan Derrick) Middlemen of the Cameroon Rivers: the Duala and their Hinterland, ca. 1600-ca. 1960. Cambridge University Press, 1999.
In Search of Sunjata: the Mande Epic as History, Literature and Performance (edited conference papers). Indiana University Press, 1999.
Trans-Saharan Africa in World History. N.Y: Oxford University Press, 2010.
(edited with Mahir Saul), Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Art Films and the Nollywood Video Revolution.” Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010.

Articles, Chapters
"The Moral Economy of Witchcraft: an Essay in Comparative History," in J. and J. L. Comaroff (eds.), Modernity and its Malcontents (University of Chicago, 1993).
"Coming of Age through Colonial Education : African Autobiography as Reluctant Bildungsroman (the Case of Camara Laye)," Boston University Discussion Papers in the African Humanities, 2000.
"The Slave Trade as History and Memory: Confrontations of Slaving Voyage Documents and Communal Traditions," William and Mary Quarterly, January 2001.
“Interpreters Self-Interpreted: The Autobiographies of Two Colonial Clerks,” in Benjamin Lawrance, Emily Lynn Osborn, and Richard Roberts (eds.). Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006, pp. 159-79.

with Woodruff Smith, “The Economic Value of British Colonial Empire in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” History Compass, 4, Issue 1 (January 2006), pp. 54-76 http://www.history-compass.com/

“The Colonial in the Attic: Imperialism, the Victorian Domestic Novel and Gentlemanly Capitalism"” British Scholar, II, 1 (Sept. 2009).

“Africa in the Global Decolonization Process: The Road to Postcoloniality,” in eds. Robert Hill and Edmond J. Keller, “Trustee for the Human Community”: Ralph J. Bunche and the Decolonization of Africa. Athens: Ohio University Press, 20010, 230-57.

With James Vaughn, “The Territorialization of Empire: Social Imperialism and Britain’s Moves into India and Tropical Africa” in Toyin Falola and Emily Brownell, Africa, Empire and Globalization Essays in Honor of A. G. Hopkins. Durham, Carolina University Press, 2011, pp. 193-212.

His current projects include an autobiographical study of the Malian intellectual and writer Amadou Hampâté Bâ (1901-1990). He is also working (together with Woodruff Smith) on a longer book, "The Road to Postcoloniality." It will focus on tropical Africa, South Asia and (to a lesser extent) the Caribbean as regions which played a key role in Europe's rise to world economic dominance in the early modern seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, became formal colonies in the modern nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when their international economic position was already marginal, and are struggling to find an economic role, political stability and cultural identity in the postmodern late twentieth/early twenty-first centuries.

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Ralph A. Austen

Professor Emeritus of African History
Ph.D. Harvard University 1966