Diamonds have long been bloody. A new history shows how Germany’s ruthless African empire brought diamond rings to retail display cases in America—at the cost of African lives.

Since the late 1990s, activists have campaigned to remove “conflict diamonds” from jewelry shops and department stores. But if the problem of conflict diamonds—gems extracted from war zones—has only recently generated attention, it is not a new one. Nor are conflict diamonds an exception in an otherwise honest industry. The modern diamond business, Steven Press shows, owes its origins to imperial wars and has never escaped its legacy of exploitation.

In Blood and Diamonds, Press traces the interaction of the mass-market diamond and German colonial domination in Africa. Starting in the 1880s, Germans hunted for diamonds in Southwest Africa. In the decades that followed, Germans waged brutal wars to control the territory, culminating in the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples and the unearthing of vast mineral riches. Press follows the trail of the diamonds from the sands of the Namib Desert to government ministries and corporate boardrooms in Berlin and London and on to the retail counters of New York and Chicago. As Africans working in terrifying conditions extracted unprecedented supplies of diamonds, European cartels maintained the illusion that the stones were scarce, propelling the nascent U.S. market for diamond engagement rings. Convinced by advertisers that diamonds were both valuable and romantically significant, American purchasers unwittingly funded German imperial ambitions into the era of the World Wars.

Amid today’s global frenzy of mass consumption, Press’s history offers an unsettling reminder that cheap luxury often depends on an alliance between corporate power and state violence.

Slavery, colonialism and emancipation are important aspects of archaeological research in the Atlantic region, but the lifeways of colonial populations remain understudied in the Indian Ocean World. Here, we help to redress this imbalance by undertaking stable isotope analysis (C, N and O) on human remains from Mauritius, a location which played an important role in the movement of people across the Indian Ocean and beyond. The results indicate that a wide range of diets was consumed in Mauritius during the nineteenth century, varying with location and circumstances of birth such that while a range of resources would have been available on the island, the proportions of the different resources consumed was different for different people. Most people consumed some C₄ resources, likely maize, although the proportion of the diet that this represented varied widely. There is some evidence for the use of marine resources, with one individual consuming a very high proportion of marine foods. In general, the people buried at the post-emancipation cemetery Le Morne consumed a higher proportion of C₄ foodstuffs and a lower proportion of animal protein and/or marine resources than those individuals buried at the formal public cemetery Bois Marchand. The data from La Morne are consistent with a population that lived separately as children and then came to live, and eat, together during adulthood. This study has shown a much more nuanced picture of diet in Mauritius at this time than was previously known. The research complements and enriches the historic narrative, adding dimensions to small islands that would otherwise remain obscure in the absence of rigorous scientific assessment of archaeological finds.

The relative educational returns on colonial versus indigenous language instruction in sub-Saharan countries have yet to be decisively estimated. To address this unanswered question, this paper provides an impact assessment of an experiment in Cameroon in which the first 3 years of schooling were conducted in a local language instead of in English. Test results in examinations in both English and math reveal that treated students exhibit gains of 1.1–1.4 of a standard deviation in grades 1 and 3 compared with the control students. It also increases the probability of being present in grades 3 and 5 by 22 and 14 percentage points, respectively. However, by the end of fifth grade, 2 years after reverting to the English stream, treated students still exhibit gains of 0.40–0.60 of a standard deviation, although the absolute scores for both groups are low enough to suggest limited learning is taking place.

In the 1880s, Europeans descended on Africa and grabbed vast swaths of the continent, using documents, not guns, as their weapon of choice. Rogue Empires follows a paper trail of questionable contracts to discover the confidence men whose actions touched off the Scramble for Africa. Many of them were would-be kings who sought to establish their own autonomous empires across the African continent—often at odds with traditional European governments which competed for control.

From 1882 to 1885, independent European businessmen and firms (many of doubtful legitimacy) produced hundreds of deeds purporting to buy political rights from indigenous African leaders whose understanding of these agreements was usually deemed irrelevant. A system of privately governed empires, some spanning hundreds of thousands of square miles, promptly sprang up in the heart of Africa. Steven Press traces the notion of empire by purchase to an unlikely place: the Southeast Asian island of Borneo, where the English adventurer James Brooke bought his own kingdom in the 1840s. Brooke’s example inspired imitators in Africa, as speculators exploited a loophole in international law in order to assert sovereignty and legal ownership of lands which they then plundered for profit.

The success of these experiments in governance attracted notice in European capitals. Press shows how the whole dubious enterprise came to a head at the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, when King Leopold of Belgium and the German Chancellor Bismarck embraced rogue empires as legal precedents for new colonial agendas in the Congo, Namibia, and Cameroon.

Modelling of emerging vector borne diseases serves as an important complement to clinical studies of modern zoonoses. This article presents an archaeo‐historic epidemiological modelling study of Rift Valley fever (RVF), using data‐driven neural network technology. RVF affects both human and animal populations, can rapidly decimate herds causing catastrophic economic hardship, and is identified as a Category A biodefense pathogen by the US Center for Disease Control. Despite recent origins circa the early 1900s, little is known about the circumstances of its inception nor the relationships between factors that affect transmission. This evidence could be vital as the disease continues to expand from its epicentre in Kenya to other parts of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. RVF is a relevant case for archaeological/palaeopathological investigations of disease as it intersects between numerous human, animal, spatial, temporal, and sociopolitical dimensions. By integrating landscape archaeology, historical evidence, and climatic data, with evidence of human behaviour gathered through ethnoarchaeological study, this article presents an applied framework for human–animal palaeopathology. This framework aligns with the One Health approach that observes disease to be intrinsically tied to ecological and societal factors. We provide a useable alternative way of thinking about disease modelling in the present and the past, ultimately seeking to support efforts to accurately predict future impacts. Tapping into longitudinal evidence from the last 50–300 years offers a powerful way to respond to the threat zoonoses will pose to human populations around the world as the climate warms.

We examine the effect on service delivery outcomes of a new information communication technology (ICT) platform that allows citizens to send free and anonymous messages to local government officials, thus reducing the cost and increasing the efficiency of communication about public services. In particular, we use a field experiment to assess the extent to which the introduction of this ICT platform improved monitoring by the district, effort by service providers, and inputs at service points in health, education and water in Arua District, Uganda. We find suggestive evidence of a short-term improvement in some education services, but these effects deteriorate by year two of the program, and we find little or no evidence of an effect on health and water services at any period. Despite relatively high levels of system uptake, enthusiasm of district officials, and anecdotal success stories, we find that relatively few messages from citizens provided specific, actionable information about service provision within the purview and resource constraints of district officials, and users were often discouraged by officials’ responses. Our findings suggest that for crowd-sourced ICT programs to move from isolated success stories to long-term accountability enhancement, the quality and specific content of reports and responses provided by users and officials is centrally important.

Authors Christensen and Laitin argue that an interplay of geographic, historical, and demographic factors undergird sub‑Saharan states’ post‑independence struggles to eradicate poverty, establish democratic accountability, and quell civil unrest. They set out the founding fathers’ challenges in transforming their postcolonial states, many of which are ethnically diverse, geographically diffuse, sparsely populated, and lacking in administrative capacity. With the legacies of the slave trade, partition, Christian missionaries, and extractive colonial institutions complicating their efforts, many African states faced stagnation, authoritarianism, and civil strife. Recent years have seen promising attempts to restore democracy to states under authoritarian rule and to liberalize their economies, suggesting that the region is moving toward a new era.
 
Relying on the best statistical data and richly illustrated with case material, this book is an indispensable source for scholars and policy analysts seeking to understand Africa’s post‑independence political trajectories.