Full name: The Battle of Adwa: African Victory in the Age of Empire

Author: Raymond Jonas Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: History Cultures: Africa, Italy Purchase/reserch links: Goodreads Amazon LibraryThing ISBNs: 9780674052741 9780674503847 0674052749 0674503848

In March 1896 a well-disciplined and massive Ethiopian army did the unthinkable-it routed an invading Italian force and brought Italy's war of conquest in Africa to an end. In an age of relentless European expansion, Ethiopia had successfully defended its independence and cast doubt upon an unshakable certainty of the age-that sooner or later all Africans would fall under the rule of Europeans. This event opened a breach that would lead, in the aftermath of world war fifty years later, to the continent's painful struggle for freedom from colonial rule. Raymond Jonas offers the first comprehensive account of this singular episode in modern world history. The narrative is peopled by the ambitious and vain, the creative and the coarse, across Africa, Europe, and the Americas-personalities like Menelik, a biblically inspired provincial monarch who consolidated Ethiopia's throne; Taytu, his quick-witted and aggressive wife; and the Swiss engineer Alfred Ilg, the emperor's close advisor. The Ethiopians' brilliant gamesmanship and savvy public relations campaign helped roll back the Europeanization of Africa. Figures throughout the African diaspora immediately grasped the significance of Adwa, Menelik, and an independent Ethiopia. Writing deftly from a transnational perspective, Jonas puts Adwa in the context of manifest destiny and Jim Crow, signaling a challenge to the very concept of white dominance. By reopening seemingly settled questions of race and empire, the Battle of Adwa was thus a harbinger of the global, unsettled century about to unfold. Similar books: Rubicon by Tom Holland The Empire Of Necessity by Greg Grandin All or Nothing by Jonathan Steinberg The Slave Ship by Marcus Rediker Rome's Vestal Virgins by Robin Lorsch Wildfang Africa as a Living Laboratory by Helen Tilley The Ruin of Kasch by Roberto Calasso Ibn Battuta in Black Africa by Said Hamdun The Fall of the Asante Empire by Robert B. Edgerton The Conquest of Morocco by Douglas Porch The Lost Kingdoms of Africa by Gus Casely-Hayford How to Do It by Rudolph M. Bell A Distant Mirror by Barbara W. Tuchman The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan All Hell Let Loose by Max Hastings 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof by J. A. Rogers Dreamers and Deceivers by Glenn Beck Twenty Million Tons Under the Sea by Daniel V. Gallery History by Adam Hart-Davis Astoria by Peter Stark