State and Society in Pre-colonial Asante

A detailed and richly nuanced historical portrait of pre-colonial Asante.

T. C. McCaskie (Author)

9780521894326, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 30 October 2003

516 pages, 12 b/w illus. 4 maps
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.9 cm, 0.75 kg

"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embedded in richly detailed and voluminously annotated Asante cultural and historical data derived from published and unpublished, oral and written, Asante and European sources."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

Scholarship on the West African kingdom of Asante is at the leading edge of Africanist research. In this book, T. C. McCaskie gives a detailed and richly nuanced historical portrait of pre-colonial Asante. His delineation of state and society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is centred on an extended analysis of the crucial ritual of the annual Kumase odwira festival. It is at once a profound historical reconstruction of an African polity, and a deeply informed meditation on key Asante concepts and ideas. Throughout the book, the Asante experience is consistently discussed in relation to a broad range of historiography and critical theory.

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.

Subject Areas: African history [HBJH]