Keith Hart's main research has been on Africa and the African diaspora. He has taught at numerous universities, most significantly at Cambridge where he was director of the African Studies Centre. He has contributed to the concept of the informal economy to development studies and has published widely on economic anthropology. He is visiting Professor and International Director of the Human Economy Programme, University of Pretoria, Centennial Professor of Economic Anthropology, London School of Economics, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, Goldsmiths College, University of London.

History is usually written by the winners. A century ago, people of European descent controlled 90% of the planet’s land and they have dominated representations of world society before and since then. But we live at a time when all that is palpably changing, symbolised by the rise of the BRICS to challenge western hegemony. Africa too is rapidly increasing its share of world population and economic growth. World society is still in large part a racial order based on colour with black people assigned the bottom rung. The coming century offers the real prospect of an end to this. After all, China was the poorest and most violent region in the world during the 1930s and look at it now. What does world history look like from an African perspective?

These lectures are not a survey, but each lecture rather examines one or more exceptional books addressing various aspects of Africa’s place in world history, arranged in a rough historical sequence. Every one of these books, a good number of them written by Africans and members of the African diaspora, has inspired the lecturer. This is lecturing for belief, not lecturing for knowledge. The lectures are intended as a guide to reading and a stimulus to personal research.

These lectures took place between February 4th and March 1st 2013 in the Humanities Building, University of Pretoria as part of the Human Economy Research Programme.