Anjuli Webster (2023)

Anjuli Webster is a PhD candidate in African History at Emory University. She has trained and taught in history and anthropology in South Africa, Tanzania, and the United States. Her research and teaching centre southern Africa as a world-historical location in global transformations between 1700-1900. Understanding how and why histories of colonial conquest and violence continue to shape the present is a central concern of her work as a historian.

Webster’s dissertation, ‘Fluid Empires’ explores transformations in sovereignty and ecology in southeast Africa during the 18th and 19th centuries. Working with archival sources in English, isiZulu, Afrikaans, French, and Portuguese, she analyses disputes and collaborations between the British and Portuguese empires, Brazilian and American slavers, African kingdoms and communities, Dutch-speaking voortrekkers, and American concessionaires. She argues that these processes slowly shaped transformations in land and waterscapes in southeast Africa, across the borders of contemporary Mozambique, Swaziland, and South Africa, forming an environmental foundation for the military, and political economic consolidation of conquest in the late nineteenth century.