Professor Miles Larmer

Professor of African History
St Antony's College
01865 (6)13913
miles.larmer@africa.ox.ac.uk

I joined the History Faculty in 2013: my time is divided equally between History and the inter-disciplinary African Studies Centre. I studied at the universities of Westminster, London and Sheffield, and I have taught at the universities of Pretoria, Keele, Sheffield Hallam and Sheffield. I previously worked for a number of non-governmental organisations, including Save the Children.

 

Research Interests

My research interests focus on political and social change in southern-central Africa in the second half of the twentieth century. I'm interested in the interaction between local social movements, nationalist parties and global forces in shaping post-colonial Africa. I have also carried out research on labour history and on the politics of mining in Africa, as well as an edited collection of the papers of one of Valentine Musakanya, an important intellectual and political figure in independent Zambia. I recently completed a research project on the Katangese gendarmes as a way of understanding the social and political history of war in central Africa.

In July 2016 I will start a new four-year research project, 'Comparing the Copperbelt: Political Culture and Knowledge Production in Central Africa', supported by a European Research Council Consolidator Grant. You can hear me talk about the project here. This project provides the first comparative historical analysis – local, national and transnational - of the Central African copperbelt. This globally strategic mineral region is central to the history of two nation-states (Zambia and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)), as well as wider debates about the role of mineral wealth in development.

The project will examine the copperbelt as a single region divided by a (post-)colonial border, across which flowed minerals, peoples, and ideas about the relationship between them. It will explore the interaction between intellectual understanding of copperbelt politics and society and the copperbelt's own political culture, exploring the interchange between academic and popular perceptions. This project will investigate the hypothesis that the resultant understanding of this region is the result of a long unequal interaction of definition and determination between western observers and African participants that has only a partial relationship to the reality of mineral extraction, filtered as it has been through successive sedimentations of imagining and representation laid down over nearly a century of urban life in central Africa.

See page on St Antony's College website

Publications

  • Nation-Making at the Border: Zambian Diplomacy in the Democratic Republic of Congo

    2019
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    Journal article
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    COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN SOCIETY AND HISTORY
    nationalism, borders, decolonization, Africa, Zambia, Democratic Republic of Congo, diplomacy

  • Historicising nationalism in Africa

    2018
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    Journal article
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    Nations and Nationalism
    © The author(s) 2018. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2018 This paper proposes rethinking nationalism as a political ideology and force in Africa outside the boundaries of the postcolonial African state. It argues against national histories and for histories of the construction of African nationalisms. In analysing the anti-colonial basis of nationalism globally, it argues that the basis for African nationalism is similar to and not distinct from dominant nationalist processes elsewhere. The paper analyses the problematic historiography of African nationalism, arguing that the focus on political outcomes – the independent nation-state – has distorted and distracted from a necessary historical focus on process, best understood as involving competing and contested nationalisms before and after national independence. Having identified a wave of recent literature that analyses such competing nationalisms across the continent, the paper sets out a research agenda for systematic historical analysis of African nationalism.

  • Contested wealth: Social and political mobilisation in extractive communities in Africa

    2017
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    Journal article
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    Extractive Industries and Society
    © 2017 Elsevier Ltd This introductory paper analyses historical and contemporary developments in the social and political mobilisation of what are termed ‘extractive communities’ in Africa. It demonstrates the centrality of diverse contestations, both between extractive corporations and extractive communities, and within communities themselves, over the real and envisioned benefits of mining and oil production. In contextualising the articles carried in this special section of Extractive Industries and Society, it places these dynamics in an assessment of Africa's past and current position in global economic and political processes of extractive exploitation, and, building on the insights of these articles, suggests ways in which research on these communities may be developed in the future.

  • Permanent precarity: capital and labour in the Central African copperbelt

    2017
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    Journal article
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    Labor History
    © 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This article provides a new history of mine capital and labour in the ‘Central African Copperbelt’–the cross-border mining region of the Zambian copperbelt and Haut Katanga in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It doing so, it seeks to overcome the limitations of earlier structurally minded analysis rooted in modernist notions regarding the transformative capacity of mining capital and a ‘new’ African working class. Building on post-structuralist challenges to such assumptions, the article demonstrates the precarity, unevenness and uncertainty of the actually existing copperbelt economy and society. The comparison of the two copperbelt regions enables consideration of differential outcomes as a way of rethinking apparent inevitabilities. Analysis of how ideas about these mining societies were generated and circulated helps explain how dominant ways of understanding copperbelt capital and labour relations became established and continue to inform nostalgia for a ‘golden age’ of mining-fuelled prosperity at odds with historical reality.

  • At the Crossroads: Mining and Political Change on theKatangese-Zambian Copperbelt

    2016
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    Journal article
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    Oxford Handbooks Online
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