Another World? East Africa and the Global 1960s (2018-2022)
Aiming to understand and explain how East Africa’s global connections systematically broke down after independence
CSMCH members Emma Hunter and Ismay Milford are working on a major new project on East Africa after decolonisation. The project seeks to understand and explain how East Africa’s global connections systematically broke down after independence, opening up a set of new and unpredictable paths forward. Using a variety of print media, the project interrogates key assumptions of the linearity of globalisation by exploring how a vision of a connected postcolonial world shattered. The project's main objectives are:
- To broaden our understanding of how East Africans imagined the world and their place in it by excavating networks of global affinity between authors and readers spread across the world.
- To assess the implications of the implosion of cosmopolitan, internationalized utopian visions of Africa’s place in the world for the period of economic and political crisis that followed.
- To emphasise the importance of the African experience for studies of globalization from across the humanities and social sciences.
The project is funded by the Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grants scheme, and is based in the Edinburgh Centre for Global History.
Recent Publications
A. Adima, 'Exposed Inequalities: Emancipation and Constraint in the Experiences of Kenyan Women Students Abroad (1950s-1960s)', Diasporas (2022).
I. Milford, G. McCann, E. Hunter & D. Branch, 'Another World? East Africa, Decolonisation and the Global History of the Mid-Twentieth Century', Journal of African History, First View (2021).
A. Adima, 'Will Africa be included in a global history of Covid-19?', History Journal blog, 16 June 2021.
A. Adima, 'Creative Writing, Women’s Lives, and East African History', History Workshop Online, 18 March 2021.
G. McCann, 'The trumpets and travails of "south-south cooperation": African students in India since the 1940s', in K. King & M. Venkatachalam (eds.) India's Development Diplomacy & Soft Power in Africa (James Currey, 2021).
I. Milford & G McCann, 'African internationalisms and the erstwhile trajectories of Kenyan community development: Joseph Murumbi’s 1950s', Journal of Contemporary History, First View (2021).
D. Branch, 'Public letters and the culture of politics in Kenya, c.1960-75', Journal of Eastern African Studies, 15, 2, (2021).
C. Vaughan, E. Hunter, J. MacArthur & G. McCann, 'Thinking East African: debating federation and regionalism, 1960-77', in M. Grilli & F. Gerits (eds.) Visions of African unity: new perspectives on the history of pan-Africanism and African unification projects (Palgrave Macmillam, 2021).