100 books like Blood and Diamonds

People learn democracy by practicing it. The Germans practiced and practiced, and eventually got better at it. This is the main argument of Margaret Lavinia Anderson’s stunning book. Scrutinizing hundreds of contested elections, Anderson shows how Germans gradually reformed their authoritarian structures without significant constitutional reform. She demonstrates that the grassroots struggle for more democracy brought voters out of their narrow communities and helped form a wider civic culture. Alas, however, practice did not make perfect, and Germany was not saved from its own aggressive militarism.

No one has dissected the military culture of the German Army with such a sharp analytical scalpel as Isabel Hull. This book, “a study in institutional extremism,” takes us deep into the mind of the German military. Hull argues that since the Franco-German War of 1870, German military leaders began to conceive of war as not over until complete military victory was obtained. This insight led her to the controversial contention that Germany’s large-scale slaughter of the Herero and Nama in Southwest Africa was not primarily a result of racism or of genocidal impulses in German culture generally, but of operational doctrine.

Full with arresting interpretations of visual material, this book shows how modern advertising subtly influenced racist templates. The prose is carefully-wrought and elegant. The dissection of racist images is done with patience and subtlety. And in the process, we learn how,  in the age of high imperialism, advertising reinforced ordinary racism and white supremacy became a default position.

When historians write about Imperial Germany, they tend to focus on the largest of its 25 states, Prussia. One of the many merits of Retallack’s work is its focus on the less-studied Kingdom of Saxony, which sought to stem the rise of socialism by introducing a series of restrictive electoral laws. Here the prime movers behind attempts to limit democracy were not reactionary Junkers with vast country estates, or army officers in spiked helmets, but urban liberals, whose fear of socialism often outweighed any egalitarian impulses. The story of electoral politics in the German Empire is complex and controversial, but Retallack—from the University of Toronto—shines new light on the bourgeois face of German authoritarianism.

Zimmerman’s groundbreaking book combines histories of labor, agriculture, and industry with histories of the German and American empires in Africa.

Black Americans like Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois are key players within this remarkable tale of how the Jim Crow South’s cotton industry and racial politics became a global export.

Conrad’s account of a futile pilgrimage up the Congo, as recounted by the unreliable narrator Marlow, has inspired many more works than its modernist contemporaries, and is by turns terribly unnerving and deeply, darkly comic.

Critics claim that the novel has received more academic analysis than any other English novel, and has thus shaped literary criticism; it has also provoked trenchant creative responses such as Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart.

It was adapted for radio by Orson Welles, and for TV by Nic Roeg, but of course the most stunning version is Francis Ford Coppola’s movie Apocalypse Now, which transposes the story to the Vietnam War.

This has itself led to computer games and even a comic-book version of a trip to the outer reaches of London, perfectly encapsulating the enduring myth of the pointless enterprise.

Africa as a Living Laboratory is a far-reaching study of the thorny relationship between imperialism and the role of scientific expertise—environmental, medical, racial, and anthropological—in the colonization of British Africa. A key source for Helen Tilley’s analysis is the African Research Survey, a project undertaken in the 1930s to explore how modern science was being applied to African problems. This project both embraced and recommended an interdisciplinary approach to research on Africa that, Tilley argues, underscored the heterogeneity of African environments and the interrelations among the problems being studied. While the aim of British colonialists was unquestionably to transform and modernize Africa, their efforts, Tilley contends, were often unexpectedly subverted by scientific concerns with the local and vernacular to the understanding of imperial history, colonial development, and the role science played in both.

A mere 172 pages, this book examines the brutality of European colonialism in the 19th century, uncovering genocides I had never heard of that were perpetrated by so-called “civilized people” on so-called “primitive people.” 

The justification for this barbarism was that they for the benefit of the people annihilated because they could not live in the modern world. 

That justification is the same one often used on this side of the ocean for the genocide or “removal” of Indigenous people from their ancient lands and for the enslavement of African people who were “improved” by being around white people. 

Part travelogue, part history, part literary analysis – Lindqvist focuses on Joseph Conrad’s novel The Heart of Darkness – the book cannot be easily categorized and when reading it I often wondered what he was doing. 

But my understanding of both colonialism and what the Europeans did when they came to… show more.

The Scramble for Africa: The White Man's Conquest of the African Continent from 1876 to 1912 is a comprehensive history of the colonization of African territory by European powers between 1876 to 1912 known as the Scramble for Africa.

I am an African. I was born and raised in Africa. When I read about the horrors of the colonization of the continent I live on, I simply could not believe what I was reading. It took a lot more reading and research before I fully understood the implications and impact of this colonization. This led me to understand the place of wildlife in the early history of colonization and the evolution of a wildlife ethic.

Colonial powers viewed Africa as their sole domain for domination of its people and exploitation of its resources for the benefit of the colonial power and no benefit at all to the colony. Humans and… show more.

Owen White’s excellent book has given Algerian wine the place it deserves in the wine history of both Algeria and France. Wine production, introduced to Algeria by French settlers in the late 1800s, was an anomaly because the majority Muslim population of the colony did not drink. But it became essential to the French wine industry because it was commonly blended with the then-anemic wines of southern France to make wines with colour and strength. Even so, many French wine producers regarded Algeria as a rival and there was a constant tension between producers who needed Algerian wine and those who resented it. It was resolved when Algeria won independence from France and the wine industry there went into steep decline.