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

"Beyond 'History'": Two Films of the Deep Mande Past," in Vivian Bickford-Smith and Richard Mendelsohn (eds.). Black and White in Colour: African History on Screen. Oxford: James Currey, 2006.

"Africa and globalization: colonialism, decolonization and the postcolonial malaise" (review article), Journal of Global History, I, 3 (2006): 403-08.

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].

In Search of Sunjata: the Mande Epic as History, Literature and Performance (Indiana University Press, 1999) [edited conference papers].

(with Jonathan Derrick) Middlemen of the Cameroon Rivers: the Duala and their Hinterland, ca. 1600-ca. 1960 (Cambridge University Press, 1999).

(with Woodruff Smith) "Private Tooth Decay as Public Economic Virtue: the Slave-Sugar Triangle, Consumerism and European Industrialization," Social Science History, 14. 1 (1990), pp. 95-115; also in Joseph E. Inikori and Stanley L. Engerman (eds.), The Atlantic Slave Trade (Durham: Duke U., 1992), pp. 183-203. [reprinted in Stanley L. Engerman (ed.) Trade and the Industrial Revolution, 1700-1850 (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1996)].

"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.

"From a Colonial to a Postcolonial African Voice: Amkoullel: l'enfant peul," Roundtable on Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Research in African Literature, 31, 3 (Fall 2000), 1-17.

"The Slave Trade as History and Memory: Confrontations of Slaving Voyage Documents and Communal Traditions," William and Mary Quarterly, January 2001.

He has recently completed a book tentatively entitled The Trans-Saharan World dealing with North African, Saharan and West-Central Sudanic history mainly in the era of Islamic caravan trade. Another growing project is 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