The Civilizations of Africa

A History to 1800

Christopher Ehret

Narrated by Simon Vance

Approximately 10 hours

Unabridged

$25.00

April

Please notify me when this recording becomes available for purchase

Book published by University of Virginia Press

With his focus on precolonial Africa, Christopher Ehret provides in The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800 a remarkably complete and original overview of African history during the long periods sparsely covered in most other general histories of the continent. He examines African inventions and civilizations from 16,000 BCE to 1800 CE from the northern tip of Tunisia to the Cape of Good Hope in the south.

Logically organized by topic and era, Ehret’s heavily illustrated and easily accessible text reveals the diversity of African history. It explores the wide range of social and cultural as well as technological and economic change in Africa, and it depicts African agricultural, social, political, cultural, technological, and economic history in relation to developments in the rest of the world. Designed to address the glaring lack of texts concentrating on Africa before 1800, this book can be fruitfully combined with histories of Africa since 1800 to build a full and well-rounded understanding of the roles of Africa’s peoples in human history.

Christopher Ehret is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of An African Classical Age: Eastern and Southern Africa in World History, 1000 B.C. to A.D. 400.

Simon Vance (narrator) is the winner of numerous Earphones Awards (AudioFile), an Audie Award (Audio Publishers Association), three Audiobook of the Year Awards (AudioFile), and the profession’s highest honor, a Golden Voice (AudioFile).

REVIEWS:

“An authoritative and strikingly original overview of African history up to 1800...”

—Patrick Manning, Northeastern University, author of Migration in Modern World History, 1500-2000

“[C]hallenging and innovative...thorough and masterful..... One hopes that Christopher Ehret has initiated a new trend in the writing of African history textbooks,one that challenges previously accepted chronologies and ideas and presents us with an interpretation that connects social, economic, political, and cultural history.”

—African Studies Review