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This paper seeks to position the Scramble for Africa in the context of the continent's transformative, global nineteenth century. While imperial historiography develops apace, Africa-facing analyses of the continent's partition and the processes which led to it are increasingly rare. European expansion into Africa was characterized by an aggressive dynamism, and millions of Africans experienced profound crisis in the process of the establishment of colonial rule. Yet Africa's revolutionary nineteenth century was both driven by, and culminated in, complex processes of co-option on the part of Africans and Europeans. The paper proposes that a more Africa-centered assessment of the Scramble is possible, one which aims to contextualize the partition of the continent as part of an ongoing, endogenously shaped but often exogenously connected, transformation in political, economic, and social organization and behavior. While no single overarching theory can apply to the entire continent, it is possible to identify dynamics and processes for change that recur across Africa, from political and military reform to economic innovation. These point toward possibilities for reframing Africa's development in the late precolonial period, and enable us to challenge the hegemony long enjoyed by scholars of European empires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, Jōkichi Takamine and Albert Calmette are known for their contribution to the history of medicine. Yet their early careers centered not on medicine, but on biotechnology, and on parallel projects to bring a food processing technology used across Asia to new audiences around the world. In the end, they both succeeded, but in very different ways. Takamine would make his fortune with "Taka-Diastase," a patent digestive aid once popular around the world; Calmette would help develop the "Amylo Process" of industrial brewing and distilling used as the basis of exploitative alcohol monopolies in colonial Indochina and Formosa. Understanding how a single technology could take on two radically different forms provides a unique opportunity to explore entanglements of science, empire, and capitalism in a globalizing world. Empires and capitalist enterprises combined to send mold along pathways that both reflected and transcended imperial boundaries. And as it traveled, mold was remade by—and in turn helped to remake—the political economies it encountered. Today, when the products of mold technologies are part of our daily lives, it's tempting to see globalization in terms of seamless, uniform, and seemingly inevitable outcomes. This paper focuses attention instead on alternative paths, contingent and deeply inequitable processes, and the way science, empire, and capitalism produced the modern world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various papers published in the October 2016 issue including one the Ibis trilogy of the author Amitav Ghosh, one by Marc Matera on metropolitan cultures of empire and one by Claire Wintle on the Smithsonian Institution.

The article discusses papers presented in the journal's special section that examined the history of India, including David Gilmartin's paper on the judicial treatment of caste in India, Sujit Sivasundaram's assessment of the impact of colonialism on India and Mithi Mukherjee's exploration of freedom in the Gandhian nonviolent movement.

The article provides an account of an expedition sent by Tuskegee Institute to German Togo during the first decade of the twentieth century. Through the expedition, American cotton varieties were introduced to Togo. Moreover, the expedition had an ideological mission which is to impose the American New South Image of the Negro on the Togolese. In this paper, the author studies the production of commodities, identities and social scientific knowledge in terms of practice and class conflict by combining psychoanalytic and Marxist approaches. Furthermore, it explores the interplay of intention, policies, misunderstanding and violence that has been part of the history of imperialism.