By Ivor Wilks
“Wilks’ writing here is as informed, engaged and questing as ever.”
African Affairs
“Wilks is willing to take risks, and even make mistakes, for the sake of opening discussion and expanding knowledge…Forests of Gold is impressive history. One comes away awed at the level of historical reconstruction Wilks has accomplished, demonstrating a level of analysis that has not been achieved regarding almost any other precolonial African state, and which has been achieved here because of Wilks’s forty years of commitment, sensitivity, integrity, and belief in the profession of history and the history of African peoples.”
The International Journal of African Historical Studies
“Wilks’ contribution to our understanding of the history of Asante and that of other Akan-speaking peoples is incalculable. It is evident not only in his own work but in that of the published research of the many talented students he has directed during a long, fruitful career.”
Journal of African History
Forests of Gold is a collection of essays on the peoples of Ghana with particular reference to the most powerful of all their kingdoms: Asante. Beginning with the global and local conditions under which Akan society assumed its historic form between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, these essays go on to explore various aspects of Asante culture: conceptions of wealth, of time and motion, and the relationship between the unborn, the living, and the dead. The final section is focused upon individuals and includes studies of generals, of civil administrators, and of one remarkable woman who, in 1831, successfully negotiated peace treaties with the British and the Danes on the Gold Coast. The author argues that contemporary developments can only be fully understood against the background of long-term trajectories of change in Ghana.
Ivor Wilks is a leading scholar and teacher of African History whose contributions include path-breaking research on Asante. He has published many books and articles on West African government, politics, society, culture, and religion. Wilks retired from Northwestern University where he was the Melville J. Herskovits Professor of African Studies in 1993. More info →
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Rights: World
The Green Archipelago
Forestry in Preindustrial Japan
By Conrad Totman
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Foreword by James L. A. Webb Jr.
This inaugural volume in the Ohio University Press Series in Ecology and History is the paperback edition of Conrad Totman’s widely acclaimed study of Japan’s environmental policies over the centuries.Professor Totman raises the critical question of how Japan’s steeply mountainous woodland has remained biologically healthy despite centuries of intensive exploitation by a dense human population that has always been dependent on wood and other forest products.
History | Historical Geography · Japanese History · Japan · Asian Studies
Encountering the Past in Nature
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A deeper understanding of contemporary environmental problems requires us to know where we come from, and the study of environmental history will help us in that quest. Environmental history, in short, may be described as an attempt to study the interaction between humans and nature in the past. How have human societies affected their environment and vice versa? What does history tell us about ecological change?The
History of the Malay Kingdom of Patani
By Ibrahim Syukri
This translation of Ibrahim Syukri’s Sejarah Kerajaan Melayu Patani (SKMP) makes available a little known but important manuscript published privately ca. 1950 and printed in jawi (Malay written in a modified Arabic script). Shortly after its publication, the book was banned in both Thailand and Malaysia. It appears that a few copies of the original printing survived.The
Anthropology · History · World and Comparative History · Asian History · Asian Studies · Southeast Asian Studies
