From Slavery to Aid

Benedetta Rossi is Lecturer in African Studies at the School of History and Cultures, University of Birmingham. She is editor of Reconfiguring Slavery: West African Trajectories (2009) and Being and Becoming Hausa: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (with Anne Haour, 2010), and author of many articles focusing on slavery and emancipation in Africa and on international aid to Niger.

• 1. At the desert's edge; 2. Between Sokoto and Agadez: inter-ethnic hierarchy in the nineteenth century; 3. Entangled histories of colonial occupation, 1899–1917; 4. Governing labour – slave, forced and migrant, 1918–45; 5. The development of 'development', 1946–83; 6. Fighting against the desert, 1984–2000; 7. Between development and dependence.

'Benedetta Rossi connects the specificities of place with the importance of connections across space, and she connects the continuities of a former slave society with the development initiatives of a colonial and post-colonial state. She uses her rich ethnographic and historical material to analyse insightfully the meaning of unequal social and economic relations, within a region, within an African state, and in relation to the external world.' Frederick Cooper, New York University