How Britain Rules Africa
[Boston]: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, 1936.
First American edition, British sheets. xiii, [1], 402 pp., map frontispiece depicting the colonial division of Africa. Bound in publisher's red cloth stamped in gilt; lacking the original dust jacket. Very Good+ with spotting to cloth, dulled gilt, and fading to spine and extremities. Foxing to upper textblock edge and along hinges, ownership signature dated June 1941 to front pastedown. Binding square and firm.
The Pan-African socialist journalist George Padmore left his native Trinidad as a young man and lived in several countries before settling in London in 1934. There he wrote How Britain Rules Africa, a thoroughly researched contribution to the anti-colonialist movement that was forming around him. He writes in the introduction:
"Throughout the book the reader will come across every conceivable crime which we are wont to associate with imperialism, but none perhaps more revolting than the ruthless and shameful methods white settlers have adopted in robbing the Natives of their best lands and then forcing them through various devices, chiefly taxation, to go and work for them. For what is land to white men in tropical Africa without black labour?"
Price: $4,500