Works
The Colonialist: The Vision of Cecil Rhodes (Oxford University Press, forthcoming in July 2025).
Cecil John Rhodes (1853-1902) migrated from England to South Africa at the age of seventeen and made a fortune in diamond-mining and gold-mining. As the prime minister of the Cape Colony, he promoted racially discriminatory legislation. His British South Africa Company governed Zambia and Zimbabwe through trickery and terror. While developing farms and mines, he dreamt of building a railroad infrastructure that reached from Cape Town to Cairo. His decisions in business and politics had a lasting impact on Southern Africa.
The First World War: A Concise Global History (Rowman & Littlefield, third edition, 2020).
In a compact but comprehensive and clear narrative, this book explores the First World War from a genuinely global perspective. Putting a human face on the war, William Kelleher Storey takes into account individual decisions and experiences as well as environmental and technological factors, such as food, geography, manpower, and weapons.
Writing History: A Guide for Students (Oxford University Press, sixth edition, 2020).
Using examples from the works of practicing historians, Writing History: A Guide for Students, leads undergraduate writers through the process of developing, researching, and composing an original historical essay.
Guns, Race, and Power in Colonial South Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
In this book, William Kelleher Storey shows that guns and discussions about guns during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries were fundamentally important to the establishment of racial discrimination in South Africa. Relying mainly on materials held in archives and libraries in Britain and South Africa, Storey explains the workings of the gun trade and the technological development of the firearms. He relates the history of firearms to ecological, political, and social changes, showing that there is a close relationship between technology and politics in South Africa.
Science and Power in Colonial Mauritius (University of Rochester Press, 1997).
Science and Power in Colonial Mauritius examines, within the context of the history of sugarcane production in Mauritius, the cross-cultural debates about the production and dissemination of science and technology from "developed" to "less-developed" countries and from elites to peasants within these countries. The book also shows in great detail that the history of science, technology, and colonialism can shed light on contemporary problems in natural resource management and global policy making.