Living for the City
Social Change and Knowledge Production in the Central African Copperbelt

A history of the cross-border Central African copperbelt, integrating the region's social history with knowledge production about it.

Miles Larmer (Author)

9781108833158, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 12 August 2021

288 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 2.8 cm, 0.696 kg

'… an excellent book, that is innovative in its border-crossing approach of the Central African Copperbelt, in its combination of social and intellectual history, and in its incisive critique of mining industry, during and after colonial rule.' Geert Castryck, H-Soz-Kult

Living for the City is a social history of the Central African Copperbelt, considered as a single region encompassing the neighbouring mining regions of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Haut Katanga and Zambian Copperbelt mine towns have been understood as the vanguard of urban 'modernity' in Africa. Observers found in these towns new African communities that were experiencing what they wrongly understood as a transition from rural 'traditional' society – stable, superstitious and agricultural – to an urban existence characterised by industrial work discipline, the money economy and conspicuous consumption, Christianity, and nuclear families headed by male breadwinners supported by domesticated housewives. Miles Larmer challenges this representation of Copperbelt society, presenting an original analysis which integrates the region's social history with the production of knowledge about it, shaped by both changing political and intellectual contexts and by Copperbelt communities themselves. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Introduction
1. Imagining the Copperbelts
2. Boom Time – Revisiting Capital and Labour in the Copperbelt
3. Space, Segregation and Socialisation
4. Political Activism, Organisation and Change in the Late Colonial Copperbelt
5. Gendering the Copperbelt
6. Nationalism and Nationalisation
7. Copperbelt cultures from the Kalela Dance to the Beautiful Time
8. Decline and Fall: Crisis and the Copperbelt, 1975-2000
9. Remaking the Land: Environmental Change in the Copperbelt's history, present and future
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Economic history [KCZ], Social & cultural history [HBTB], African history [HBJH]