Frederick Cooper (born October 27, 1947, in New York City) is an American historian who specializes in colonialization, decolonialization, and African history.
[4] His PhD dissertation, "Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa in the Nineteenth Century,"[5] was published with Yale University Press in 1977.
Though a firm base in social and polit-economical history is a constant of his works, one characteristic of Cooper's approach to history is a strong concern with epistemological questions and the possibilities and limits of knowledge production, as can best be seen in his articles on globalization and identity, reprinted in his book Colonialism in Question in 2005. Cooper's research on federalist and confederated proposals to structure relations between the French metropole and its African colonies influenced a new scholarly literature on federalism.
[8] Moreover, over the course of the last decades, several topical collections of articles by a wide array of international scholars which Cooper edited or co-edited, have had a lasting impact on global historical thought and research directions.
These include Struggle for the City (1983), International Development and the Social Sciences (1997), and Tensions of Empire (1997).