I’ve stepped back from this blog in recent years as I started work on a new project. Making an African City is about the history of spatial politics in 20th century Accra. It takes seriously indigenous systems of knowing and inhabiting space to look anew at colonial-era debates about city life. This work required asking critical questions about the way that we think about and govern the city today, bringing an ethnographic lens to the archives, and placing urban history in conversation with fields like Science and Technology Studies and Planning History. In the process, I’ve been learning far more about the history of engineering, public health and medicine, science, technology, urban planning, and development and their connections to imperialism and colonialism.
The creation and consolidation of some of these fields – like engineering, public health, urban planning, and development – are intertwined with the development of industrial capitalism and the rise of “new imperialism” in the late 19th century. On a visit to London last year, I noted that the engineering institutes, the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey and Methodist Central Hall, BBC headquarters, and the banking sector sat side-by-side in “The City” – London’s center of political and economic power. That’s no accident. While abstract, proto versions of these fields had existed for some time (early modern “Improvers”, for example), they were professionalized in new ways in the context of empire – through the work that they did, the power invested in their expertise, the travel and circulation of ideas that empire facilitated, the professional organizations that emerged to provide training and community, the experiments they did in colonial territories. Empire gave these fields new legitimacy and purpose and elevated them as part of a grand project of “civilization” ,”progress” and “improvement.”
Others – particularly medicine and science – dated back much further but took on new meaning in the context of empire, which also coincided with new understandings about disease and germs. Scientists too often embraced racism and used scientific discoveries to reinforce segregation – a situation further complicated in colonies where scientists and public health officials were given unprecedented authority to reshape urban space and dictate urban governance. However, as numerous scholars have argued, empire in general and Africa in particular, provided a new site for scientific testing and experimentation – an idea that continues to resonate in the present. The universalizing assumptions of “enlightenment” thinking might have predated imperialism but produced its own sorts of challenges.
All of this, of course, was wrapped up with the ideals and assumptions of 19th century liberalism, the economic demands/interests of industrial capitalism, the social and cultural practices of Victorian bourgeois sentimentality, and an increasingly systemic racism rooted in the evils of slavery.
The fields in which I work – History, Anthropology, STS, Digital Humanities, African Studies – are far from guiltless. Calls to “decolonize the discipline” have been taken up much more in the UK than in the US, and even then the climb feels uphill and steep as defensive academics are forced to reflect on their complicity and privilege. African Studies has been doing its own work in recent years, but it is far too slow. Urban History and Urban Studies provide its own challenges that I’ll wade into another time.
There is often an assumption of neutrality in STEM fields. While there has been quite a bit of conversation about gender and race-based discrimination in STEM in terms of lab/classroom/workplace practice, the public conversations have talked much less about the need to decolonize STEM and other technocratic fields themselves. A lot of this history is not known by practitioners, but historians have been doing the work for years. Newer fields like algorithmic sciences, big data, and AI are also receiving new critical attention.
These fields shape our world in real, concrete ways. Physical infrastructure and digital technology, health and medicine, scientific research, and urban planning and development all have incredible power. And their methods and practices are just as historically contingent and culturally/socially constructed as the rest. The assumption of neutrality perpetuates continued violence and foreclose new possibilities for learning, growth, and productive collaboration that might break down the divisions between STEM and the social sciences, arts, and humanities. Anti-racist pedagogy requires that we ask these questions.
Below is a list of resources I’ve been reading (shaped very much by my current research). My list is not comprehensive – it’s merely a starting point, and I would love others to contribute and share. In that spirit, I’ve put all of these resources in a Google doc that you can add to if you wish. I certainly will add to it as I encounter new research. I’ve also included links to my syllabi for a “Technology Cultures” seminar and “Intro to Digital Humanities“, which includes some more general and foundational texts that might prove helpful.
Disciplinary Histories Bibliography
Urban Planning
Ione Acquah, Accra Survey: A Social Survey of the capital of Ghana, formerly called the Gold Coast, undertaken for the West African Institute of Social and Economic Research, 1953-1956 (London: University of London Press), 1958.
Liora Bigon, “A History of Urban Planning and Infectious Diseases: Colonial Senegal in the Early Twentieth Century”, Urban Studies Research (2012)
Liora Bigon, “Sanitation and street layout in early colonial Lago: British and indigenous conceptions, 1851-1900″ Planning Perspectives 20 (July 2005): 247-269
Philip D. Curtin, “Medical Knowledge and Urban Planning in Tropical Africa”, American Historical Society 90(3) (Jun 1985): 594-613
Dominic Fortescue, “The Accra Crowd, the Asafo, and the Opposition to the Municipal Corporations Ordinance, 1924-25″, Canadian Journal of African Studies 24(3) (1990): 348-375
Matthew Gandy, “Planning, Anti-planning and the Infrastructure Crisis Facing Metropolitan Lagos,” Urban Studies 43(2) (February 2006): 371-396
Waseem-Ahmed Bin-Kasim, Sanitary Segregation: Cleansing Accra and Nairobi, 1908-1963 (Dissertation: Washington University), 2019.
John Parker, Making the Town: Ga State and Society in Early Colonial Accra (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann), 2000.
JDY Peel, “Urbanization and Urban History in West Africa”, The Journal of African History 21 (2) (1980): 269-277
Margaret Peil, Cities and Suburbs: Urban Life in West Africa (New York: African Publishing Company), 1981.
Nihal Perera, “The Planners’ City: The Construction of a Town Planning Perception of Colombo”, Environment and Planning A (40)(2008): 57-73
John Pickler, “The Soundproof Study: Victorian Professionals, Work Space, and Urban Noise”, Victorian Studies 42(3) (1999/2000): 427-449
Awadhendra Sharan, “In the City, Out of Place: Environment and Modernity, Delhi 1860s to 1960s”, Economic and Political Weekly 41(47) (Nov-Dec 2006): 4905-4911
Sanjay Srivastava, Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community, and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2014.
Richard Stren, “Urban Policy in Africa: A Political Analysis”, African Studies Review 15 (3) (Dec 1972): 489-516
Ato Quayson, Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 2014
William Cunningham Bissell, Urban Design, Chaos, and Colonial Power in Zanzibar (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), 2010
Benjamin Talton. “”Kill Rats and Stop Plague”: Race, Space, and Public Health in Postconquest Kumasi.” Ghana Studies 22 (2019): 95-113
Alan Mayne, Slums: The History of a Global Injustice (London: Reaktion Books), 2017.
Science
Sara Berry, No Condition is Permanent: The Social Dynamics of Agrarian Change in Sub-Saharan Africa (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann), 1993.
Raymond Dumett, “The Campaign against Malaria and the Expansion of Scientific Medical and Sanitary Services in British West Africa, 1898-1910″, African Historical Studies 1(2) (1968): 153-197
Jonathan Roberts, “Korle and the Mosquito: Histories and Memories of the Anti-Malaria Campaign in Accra: 1942-5″, Journal of African History 51(3) (2010): 343-365
Jonathan Roberts, “Medical Exchange on the Gold Coast during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries”, Canadian Journal of African Studies 45(3) (2011): 480-523
Helen Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870-1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 2011.
Helen Tilley and Robert Gordon, eds., Ordering Africa: Anthropology, European Imperialism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press), 2007.
Clapperton Mavhunga, The Mobile Workshop: The Tsetse Fly and African Knowledge Production (The MIT Press), 2018.
Clapperton Mavhunga, ed. What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa? (The MIT Press), 2017.
Engineering/Technology/Infrastructure
Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), 1989
Nikhil Anand, Hydraulic City: Water & Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 2017
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 2002.
Daniel Headrick, Power Over Peoples: Technology, Environments, and Western Imperialism, 1400 to Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 2010.
Joseph Morgan Hodge, Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of Colonialism (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press), 2007
Colin McFarlane, “Governing the Contaminated City: Infrastructure and Sanitation in Colonial and Post-Colonial Bombay”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32(2) (June 2008): 415-35
Caroline Melly, Bottlenecks: Moving, Building & Belonging in an African City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 2017.
Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), 2002
Rosalind Fredericks, Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 2018.
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 1998
Clapperton Mavhunga, Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe (The MIT Press), 2014.
Clapperton Mavhunga, ed. What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa? (The MIT Press), 2017.
Clapperton Mavhunga, “Which Mobility for (Which) Africa? Beyond Banal Mobilities” In Mobility in History: Reviews and Reflections, Peter Norton, et al, eds (Éditions Alphil-Presses universitaires suisses), 2011: 73.
Brian Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure”, Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 327-343
Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 2008
Public Health/Medicine/Sanitation
Alison Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health (New York: Palgrave MacMillan), 2004
Liora Bigon, “A History of Urban Planning and Infectious Diseases: Colonial Senegal in the Early Twentieth Century”, Urban Studies Research (2012)
Liora Bigon, “Sanitation and street layout in early colonial Lago: British and indigenous conceptions, 1851-1900″ Planning Perspectives 20 (July 2005): 247-269
Festus Cole, “Sanitation, Disease and Public Health in Sierra Leone, West Africa, 1895-1922: Case Failure of British Colonial Health Policy” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 43(2) (2015): 238-266
E.M. Collingwood, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c. 1800-1947 (London: Polity), 2001.
Philip D. Curtin, “Medical Knowledge and Urban Planning in Tropical Africa”, American Historical Society 90(3) (Jun 1985): 594-613
Raymond Dumett, “The Campaign against Malaria and the Expansion of Scientific Medical and Sanitary Services in British West Africa, 1898-1910″, African Historical Studies 1(2) (1968): 153-197
Myron Echenberg, Plague Ports: The Global Urban Impact of Bubonic Plague, 1894-1901 (New York: NYU Press), 2010.
Waseem-Ahmed Bin-Kasim, Sanitary Segregation: Cleansing Accra and Nairobi, 1908-1963 (Dissertation: Washington University), 2019.
Colin McFarlane, “Governing the Contaminated City: Infrastructure and Sanitation in Colonial and Post-Colonial Bombay”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32(2) (June 2008): 415-35
Stephanie Newell, Histories of Dirt: Media and Urban Life in Colonial and Postcolonial Lagos (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 2019
Christopher Otter, “Cleansing and Clarifying: Technology and Perception in Nineteenth-Century London”, Journal of British Studies 43(1) (January 2004): 40-64.
Jonathan Roberts, “Korle and the Mosquito: Histories and Memories of the Anti-Malaria Campaign in Accra: 1942-5″, Journal of African History 51(3) (2010): 343-
Jonathan Roberts, “Medical Exchange on the Gold Coast during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries”, Canadian Journal of African Studies 45(3) (2011): 480-523
Jonathan Roberts, “The Black Death in the Gold Coast: African and British Responses to the Bubonic Plague Epidemic of 1908”, Gateway: An Online Graduate Journal, Available at: http://grad.Usask.ca/gateway/archiveio.htm
Maynard Swanson, “The Sanitation Syndrome: Bubonic Plague and Urban Native Policy in the Cape Colony, 1900-1909″, The Journal of African History 18(3) (1977): 387-410.
Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Stanford University Press), 1991.
Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 2014
Benjamin Talton. “”Kill Rats and Stop Plague”: Race, Space, and Public Health in Postconquest Kumasi.” Ghana Studies 22 (2019): 95-113
Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 1996
