Pan-Africanism is the perception by people of African origins and descent that they have interests in common. It has been an important by-product of colonialism and the enslavement of African peoples by Europeans. Though it has taken a variety of forms over the two centuries of its fight for equality and against economic exploitation, commonality has been a unifying theme for many black people. It has, for example, resulted in the Back-to-Africa movement in the United States but also in Nationalist beliefs such as an African 'supra-nation'.
Pan-African History brings together Pan-Africanist thinkers and activists from the Anglophone and Francophone worlds of the past two-hundred years. Included are well-known figures such as Malcolm X, W.E.B. Du Bois, Kwame Nkrumah, and Martin Delany, and the authors' original research on lesser-known figures such as Constance Cummings-John and Dusé Mohammed Ali reveals exciting new aspects of Pan-African activism.