The Yoruba from Prehistory to the Present

Aribidesi Usman is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. He is co-editor of Movements, Borders, and Identities in Africa (2009) and the author of The Yoruba Frontier (2012). Toyin Falola is University Distinguished Teaching Professor and Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas, Austin. A Yoruba chief, he has received numerous awards and twelve honorary doctorates. His most recent edited volumes include Yoruba Culture and Customs (2001), The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World (2005) and The Encyclopaedia of the Yoruba (2016).

• List of figures; Preface; Acknowledgments; 1. Geography and society; Part I. Long Historical Formations: 2. Prehistory and protohistory; 3. The growth of complex societies; 4. States and small-scale polities, AD 1400–1600; Part II. Yoruba Polities and Entry into the Atlantic World: 5. The seventeenth century: the age of empire building; 6. The eighteenth century; Part III. The Nineteenth Century: Wars and Transformations: 7. Yorubaland in the nineteenth century: the height of trouble; 8. The nineteenth century: the internecine wars and consequences; 9. The nineteenth century: slave trade and slavery; 10. The nineteenth century: new agencies of transformation; Part IV. Economic, Social, and Cultural Practices over Time: 11. Precolonial economy; 12. Religion and world view; 13. Creativity: arts, body adornment, and music; Part V. Colonial Yoruba: 14. Colonial rule, economy, education, and identity; 15. Politics and identity in the late colonial era; Part VI. Postcolonial Yoruba: 16. Politics and identity: the post independence era; 17. Politics and identity at the close of the twentieth century; 18. Contemporary politics and identity; 19. Contemporary sociopolitical, economic, and cultural transformation; 20. Summary and conclusion; References; Index.

'This volume should serve as a foundational reference work for historians of West Africa, and for anyone seeking to understand world history as more than the accumulation of the histories of contemporary nation-states … Essential.' M. M. Heaton, Choice