Frederick Cooper, Professor of History at New York University, is author of Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present (2002) and coeditor, with Ann Laura Stoler, of Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (California, 1997), among other books.

• List of Illustrations Acknowledgments PART I. COLONIAL STUDIES AND INTERDISCIPLINARY SCHOLARSHIP 1. Introduction: Colonial Questions, Historical Trajectories 2. The Rise, Fall, and Rise of Colonial Studies, 1951--2001 PART II. CONCEPTS IN QUESTION 3. Identity--With Rogers Brubaker 4. Globalization 5. Modernity PART III. THE POSSIBILITIES OF HISTORY 6. States, Empires, and Political Imagination 7. Labor, Politics, and the End of Empire in French Africa 8. Conclusion: Colonialism, History, Politics Notes Index

"This is a very much needed book: on Africa, on intellectual artisanship and on engagement in emancipatory projects. Drawing on his enormous erudition in colonial history, Cooper brings together an intellectual and a moral-political argument against a series of linked developments that privilege 'taking a stance' and in favor of studying processes of struggle through engaged scholarship." - Jane I. Guyer, author of Marginal Gains"