Biography

George Roberts is a historian of contemporary Eastern Africa, with a particular specialisation in the international dimensions of decolonisation in the region. He received his PhD from the University of Warwick and has since held positions at the University of Cambridge and King's College London, where he has taught across a wide range. George's first book, Revolutionary State-Making in Dar es Salaam: African Liberation and the Global Cold War, 1961-75, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2021.

At Florence, he will be continuing to develop two projects. The first is a transnational history of the struggle to decolonise Comoros through a study of the archipelago's diaspora around East Africa's Indian Ocean Basin. The second, broader project explores Africa's experiences of the 1970s oil crises. Rather than analysing the oil crises via an economic balance sheets, it addresses their multiple, contradictory ramifications across African societies. At multiple levels – from ordinary people to international elites – it examines how Africans repositioned their livelihoods and state-making agendas in a world marked by global interdependence and everyday scarcity.