George Roberts

George Roberts is a historian of twentieth-century Eastern Africa, especially Kenya, Tanzania, and Comoros. After obtaining his PhD from the University of Warwick, George held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Cambridge and the European University Institute, Florence. He is now a Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Sheffield.

George is interested in the politics of anticolonial liberation, post-colonial state-making, and print media. As a Koch History Centre Fellow, he will be writing up a book project, Revisiting Africa's Lost Decades: Scarcity, Money, and Power in Late Twentieth-Century Kenya. This explores how, in a time of economic crisis after the oil shocks of the 1970s, Kenyans harnessed processes of globalisation and financialisation into new strategies of capital accumulation.

Revolutionary State-Making in Dar es Salaam: African Liberation and the Global Cold War, 1961-75 was published open access by Cambridge University Press in 2021, with an Africa-region print edition published by Mkuki na Nyota in Tanzania. George's work has also appeared in the Journal of Eastern African Studies, Journal of African History, Journal of Global History, and Cold War History.