NSSCAS History 8234 flashcards

32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Periodisation

The historian's decision about where a period begins and ends. It is an interpretive choice based on stated criteria, not a natural fact, and different criteria produce different turning points.

Causation hierarchy

Ranking causes by weight and type: long-term structural conditions, medium-term pressures, and short-term triggers. Explaining a single event requires showing how levels interacted rather than listing causes.

Significance criteria

Judging historical importance by scale of impact, depth of change in people's lives, durability over time, and contemporary resonance. Significance is argued with evidence, not assumed.

Provenance

The origin of a source: author, date, place, and circumstances of creation. It frames what a source can credibly show before its content is even assessed.

Reliability versus utility

Reliability concerns whether a source's claims are trustworthy; utility concerns what it can help answer. A biased or inaccurate source can still be highly useful evidence of attitudes or propaganda.

Annales school

French historiographical movement associated with Bloch and Braudel, emphasising long-term structures (longue durée), geography, and collective mentalities over short-term political events and individual actors.

Subaltern studies

Postcolonial school, associated with Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak, recovering histories of colonised common people and interrogating whether elite archives can represent their voices.

Oral tradition

Testimony transmitted across generations, often orally. Historians assess it through genre conventions, transmission chains, interviewer effects, and corroboration with documentary or archaeological evidence.

Berlin Conference 1884–85

Meeting of European powers that set rules for African partition, including effective occupation and free trade. It established principles but did not itself draw the specific colonial boundaries.

Sokoto Caliphate

Islamic state founded after Usman dan Fodio's jihad from 1804 across what is now northern Nigeria. It centralised administration, promoted scholarship, and expanded through slave-based plantation agriculture.

Legitimate commerce

Nineteenth-century African export trade in palm oil, groundnuts, cocoa and rubber replacing slave exports after abolition. It tied African producers to volatile world markets and often relied on coercion.

Maji Maji rebellion

Uprising in German East Africa, 1905–07, against forced cotton labour and taxation. Its suppression by starvation tactics killed tens of thousands and reshaped German colonial policy.

Pan-Africanism

Movement for solidarity among Africans and the diaspora, expressed through congresses from 1900 and figures such as Du Bois, Padmore and Nkrumah, feeding later independence nationalism.

Indirect rule

Colonial system associated with Frederick Lugard, governing through recognised 'native authorities' under supervision. It was cheap and preserved local structures, but froze and reshaped chieftaincy.

Direct rule

Colonial administration through metropolitan officials and imported law, associated with French and Portuguese practice. It pursued assimilation or administrative centralisation rather than preserving indigenous authority.

Dual mandate

Lugard's doctrine that colonial powers held a trusteeship both for indigenous welfare and for wider international interests. It justified colonial rule in humanitarian language.

Congo Free State

Territory privately controlled by Leopold II of Belgium from 1885, exploited through rubber quotas and forced labour. International outcry over atrocities led to Belgian annexation in 1908.

Settler colonialism

Colonialism in which Europeans permanently settle, seeking land and political dominance. Examples include Algeria, Kenya and Southern Rhodesia; it typically produced sharp racial hierarchies and land alienation.

Bandung Conference

1955 meeting of Asian and African states in Indonesia, promoting anti-colonialism, sovereignty and economic cooperation. It prefigured the Non-Aligned Movement and legitimised newly independent states.

FLN

National Liberation Front, the Algerian nationalist movement that waged armed struggle against France from 1954. Algerian independence followed the 1962 Évian Accords after a costly war.

Neocolonialism

Nkrumah's term for continued economic and political control of formally independent states by former colonial powers, exercised through trade dependence, debt, multinational firms and military influence.

Mau Mau emergency

Kenyan anti-colonial insurgency, mainly among Kikuyu, against land alienation and British rule (1952–60). Its suppression accelerated constitutional moves toward independence in 1963.

Herero and Nama war

War in German South West Africa, 1904–08, against colonial land seizure. Von Trotha's 1904 extermination order and subsequent deaths are widely described as genocide.

SWAPO

South West Africa People's Organisation, founded 1960, which led armed and diplomatic struggle for Namibian independence and has governed the country since 1990.

UN Resolution 435

1978 Security Council resolution setting out a plan for UN-supervised elections and Namibian independence. It was implemented in 1989 after the 1988 tripartite accords.

Omugulugwombashe

Site of the first armed clash of Namibia's liberation war in August 1966, when South African forces attacked SWAPO fighters. It is commemorated as the start of the armed struggle.

Odendaal Plan

1964 South African commission report proposing ethnic homelands in South West Africa, deepening segregation and land division. It was rejected internationally as consolidating illegal occupation.

Congress of Vienna

1814–15 settlement after Napoleon, restoring monarchies and creating a balance of power. It established the Concert of Europe and redrew borders without regard to national sentiment.

Treaty of Versailles

1919 peace treaty imposing territorial losses, disarmament and reparations on Germany, with war-guilt clauses. Its terms are debated as a cause of interwar instability and Nazism.

Containment

US Cold War strategy, articulated by George Kennan in 1946–47, of limiting Soviet expansion through deterrence, alliances and economic aid rather than direct war.

Cuban Missile Crisis

October 1962 confrontation over Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. A naval quarantine and secret negotiations produced withdrawal and a hotline, marking the Cold War's closest approach to nuclear war.

Non-Aligned Movement

Grouping of states formally founded at Belgrade in 1961, led by Tito, Nehru, Nasser and Sukarno, seeking independence from both superpower blocs during the Cold War.