During this period, scholars reframed Africa as an active actor embedded within a global historical process, employing a world-systems lens that foregrounded interconnections with broader state, labor, and capital networks. They favored long-term, comparative analyses and collaborative methods that challenged marginalization by recentering African agency in decolonization and development debates. Thematic focus clustered on mass mobilization, politics of state-building, and the structural reconfigurations of labor under capitalist economies, highlighting how political economy and governance shaped trajectories of modernization and independence.