‘Reading farm and forest: colonial forest knowledge and policy in Southern Nigeria’

With contributions from established as well as younger scholars, the authors here offer a set of rich case-studies that demonstrate novel and productive approaches to the study of colonial knowledge. The volume covers British, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish colonial encounters in Africa, Asia, America and the Pacific, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Taking into consideration the most recent scholarship and theories of colonial and post-colonial studies, the authors employ various reading strategies to explore the potential and limitations of the European colonial archive. As a whole, Engaging Colonial Knowledge thus presents a commitment to generating new historical, anthropological and sociological insights about human phenomena from older archival traces; insights about the nature of cross-cultural interactions, indigenous social life, land tenure, political authority, marginalised activities, epistemologies of governance, or rites of power.