State and Society in Pre-colonial Asante

by T. C. McCaskie

Overview

Scholarship on the West African kingdom of Asante is at the leading edge of Africanist research. T.C. McCaskie gives a detailed and nuanced historical portrait of precolonial Asante. The book is both a profound historical reconstruction of an African polity, and a deeply informed meditation on Asante concepts and ideas. Throughout the book, the Asante experience is consistently discussed in relation to a broad range of historiography and critical theory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521410090
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	02/23/1995
Series:	African Studies , #79
Pages:	516
Product dimensions:	6.22(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.30(d)

Table of Contents

Preface; 1. Varieties of the Asante past; 2. Society and state in Asante history; 3. Asante odwira: experience interpreted, history constructed; 4. The Asante past considered; Appendices.

Editorial Reviews

"...an extremely detailed and skillful reconstruction of the Asante past." American Historical Review

"This intellectually ambitious and feisty book seeks to provide an alternative interpretation of Asante history during its centuries of independence and thereby to model a transforming approach to African historiography....McCaskie's analytical argument is embedded in richly detailed and voluminously annotated Asante cultural and historical data derived from published and unpublished, oral and written, Asante and European sources." Journal of Interdisciplinary History

From the Publisher