Beschreibung:
Ivor Wilks' book marks an essential stage in the development of historical research on pre-colonial Africa. By the wealth and diversity of his sources. Ivor Wilks renews completely our knowledge of Ashanti history for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries far from being entirely dictated to by its relations with Europe, the Ashanti kingdom is crossroads, widely exposed to Sudanese influences and knows how to play upon its position to ensure its independence and prosperity. Ivor Wilks presents successively the evolution of the monarchy and its gradual "secularisation" : the transformation of institutions and the halting progress of centralization ; the movement of factions within the reigning elite, and what was at stake in their conflicts; and finally, the process of the emergence of social classes beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century. He thus reconstructs a history of the Ashanti as seen from within, in which are restored to their rightful places beside the analysis of causes the analyses of motives projects and ideologies.