Imagine Lagos

Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Riverside. Her writing has appeared in History in Africa; Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East; the Journal of the Middle East and Africa; African Women in the Atlantic World; and the 2018 documentary Journey of an African Colony. Her historical maps of old Lagos can be seen online at https://newmapsoldlagos.com.

Imagine Lagos challenges readers to rethink the history of Lagos and other global cities by demonstrating how spatial analysis using maps and other sources transforms knowledge about their pasts. The book makes major contributions to African history and urban history as well as to the digital and spatial humanities. - Kristin Mann, professor emerita, Emory University In Imagine Lagos, Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi executes an exciting analysis of maps to produce a fascinatingly novel history of Lagos in the nineteenth century. She deploys an array of digital tools and her own unique interdisciplinary analytical skills to integrate cartographic discourses into traditional historical sources. The result is a bold, brilliant history of change and multiple rebirths in a coastal West African city shaped by evolving indigenous practices, an ethnic Yoruba hinterland, a returnee Atlantic diaspora, and the marauding forces of British imperialism. - Moses E. Ochonu, Vanderbilt University Leveraging a rare combination of methodological tools and conceptual approaches, Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi's Imagine Lagos conjures a vanished landscape and the ordinary residents that made it into a city into multidimensional view. It offers a meticulous and extended exploration of how spatial analysis can unearth buried social histories, gender histories, and environmental histories of African cities. Imagine Lagos lays the literal groundwork that any scholar approaching Lagos with an attention to change over time can and must engage with. - Abosede George, author of Making Modern Girls: A History of Girlhood, Labor, and Social Development in Colonial Lagos Imagine Lagos is one of those books that appears once in a long while that seems to answer many interconnected questions that have bugged the field of African urban studies all in one fell swoop. The maps generated by some of the state-of-the art digital tools now available not only wonderfully support the research questions asked but also provide a real window into how to imagine, nay see, nineteenth-century Lagos. There is no doubt that book is going to be field-changing. - Ato Quayson, Stanford University [N]ot only a fascinating and innovative account of the spatial history of mid-nineteenth century Lagos, but an important contribution to a still rather niche type of historical scholarship-especially in African history. (H-Soz-Kult)