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| | H-Net Review: Jan Bender Shetler on Political Power in Pre-Colonial Buganda: Economy, Society, and Warfare in the ... |
 | | The Kingdom of Buganda is one of the few pre-colonial polities in Sub-Saharan Africa that can boast substantial academic scholarship reaching back forty years and written primary sources (both Ganda and western) from before the end of the nineteenth century. |
 | | An older generation of Buganda scholars, fascinated with the anatomy of a centralized kingdom that seemed to resemble the European feudal system, concentrated on the analysis of elite politics at the center of power. |
 | | Reid shows throughout the book, with a number of different kinds of evidence, that Buganda was in a state of political turmoil caused by famine, widespread abandonment of farms due to civil war, cattle disease, and, with depopulation, the onset of sleeping sickness. |
| www.h-net.org /reviews/showrev.cgi?path=113551061285266 (1720 words) |
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