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This book presents a previously untold story of Jewish-Muslim relations in modern Morocco, showing how law facilitated Jews' integration into the broader Moroccan society in which they lived. Morocco went through immense upheaval in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through the experiences of a single Jewish family, the book charts how the law helped Jews to integrate into Muslim society—until colonial reforms abruptly curtailed their legal mobility. Drawing on a broad range of archival documents, the book expands our understanding of contemporary relations between Jews and Muslims and changes the way we think about Jewish history, the Middle East, and the nature of legal pluralism.

In spring 1796, after eight months of war in the mountainous terrain of Jamaica, most of the village of Trelawney Town—a community of about 550 runaway slaves and their descendants—surrendered. They had resisted black militia and British regulars but they were frightened by the savagery of the bloodhounds imported from Cuba to defeat them. They could not have imagined the outcome that followed. The Jamaican government, fearing that the Maroon War would trigger a second Haitian Revolution, deported the Maroon families to a remote location from whence they could never return home – Nova Scotia. After four years of enduring Halifax, the Maroons were sent to the West African colony in Sierra Leone. Remarkably, some returned home in the 1840s after the British Empire abolished slavery. The insurrection in Jamaica, the deportation it triggered, and the far-reaching impact of a small group of refugees together comprise one of the earliest instances of community displacement. Yet, remarkably, although the Maroons did not choose their initial place of exile, they actively determined the next one. The Maroon rebels of Jamaica transformed into protected refugees in Nova Scotia and empire builders in Africa. During an era of British abolitionism and global expansion, a small group of black insurrectionists maneuvered on a world stage. In each British zone, the Maroons brought to bear the full range of their cultural and military experience. Their remarkable adaptations form the crux of this book.

Collecting Food, Cultivating People is a three thousand year history both of agricultural societies from the perspective of those farmers who also hunted, fished, and gathered and of the central and southern African savannas from the perspective of those who lived not within the orbits of its famous precolonial kingdoms, but within a central frontier encircled by those polities. Cereal agriculture and trade are often considered axiomatic to political change in the premodern world. Instead, political innovation in farming societies in precolonial central Africa was actually contingent on developments in hunting and fishing. The difference between food collection and cultivation was not a foregone conclusion to the practitioners who worked hard to distinguish their activities from agriculture by inventing a novel path to celebrity, friendship, and ancestorhood based on their knowledge of the bush. This book reveals the interrelated, contingent histories of subsistence, fame, talent, political authority, landscape, and personhood (both in life and in death) across the watershed events of central African history, from the transition to a Neolithic, cereal-based economy to the invention of matrilineality, the centralization of political authority in neighboring kingdoms, and the intensification of long distance trade. This story changes what we know about the development and character of political complexity in Neolithic societies by foregrounding the affective dimensions of technology and political power and the importance of personal networks and conceptions of individuality in early African history, a period dominated by histories about the development of institutions like clans, healing cults, chieftaincy, and royalty.

Since the 1970s, the U.S. Agency for International Development has spent millions of dollars to preserve Madagascar's rich biological diversity. Yet its habitats are still in decline. Studying forty years of policy making in multiple sites, this book reveals how blaming impoverished Malagasy farmers for Madagascar's environmental decline has avoided challenging other drivers of deforestation, such as the logging and mining industries. This ethnographic study reveals how Madagascar's environmental program reflects the transformation of global environmental governance under neoliberalism.

Freedom’s Debtors is a history of the British movement to abolish the slave trade, told through the lens of the history of early colonial Sierra Leone. After the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807, Sierra Leone became the judicial, military, and economic capital of British efforts to interdict slave ships. British antislavery, widely seen as a great sacrifice of economic and political capital on the altar of humanitarianism, was in fact profitable, militarily useful, and crucial to the expansion of British power in West Africa. The colony was closely connected to the elite leaders of the abolitionist movement in Britain, and became closely identified with their business interests. This history of the abolition of the British slave trade in Sierra Leone offers insight into how antislavery policies were used to justify colonialism and reframes a moment considered a watershed in British public morality as the beginning of morally ambiguous and exploitative colonial history. From Sierra Leone, it is easier to see British antislavery as it really was: acquisitive, devoted to coercive and gradual schemes for emancipation, militarised, and shot through with imperial ambitions.

Like much of the globe, the African continent is in the midst of navigating numerous, interwoven environmental challenges. From climate-related risks such as crop failure and famine to longer-term concerns about sustainable urbanization, environmental justice, and biodiversity conservation, African states are charged with addressing a complex range of issues. As this book demonstrates, they are doing so with innovations such as community-based conservation programs and transnational parks, rural development schemes and environmental education initiatives, carbon taxes and pricing for ecosystem services, and significant investments into hydropower, solar, and wind energy. It deploys a theoretical framework for analysing green states in Africa inspired by Michel Foucault and postcolonial theory, which focuses attention on the governance and contestation of land and territory, populations and biopolitics, economies and international relations. Although much of the literature on “green states” has focused on highly developed areas in Europe and North America, this book reveals how central African environmental politics are to the transformation of African states, challenges current understandings of green politics, and explores the ramifications for the rest of the global south.