Bruce Fetter
Bruce Sigmund Fetter (June 8, 1938 – April 20, 2017) was an American historian, social scientist, and Africa specialist. He studied urban history, historical demography, and later public health. He was a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee from 1967 to 2009.
Fetter was born in Ashland, Kentucky. He studied at Harvard University, earned an MPhil from Oxford University, and received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1968. His doctoral work examined the urban growth of Elisabethville and Lubumbashi (now Lubumbashi) under Belgian colonial rule, supervised by Jan Vansina.
His PhD research was published as The Creation of Elisabethville, 1910–1940 (1976), regarded as the first book-length study of a colonial African city. He continued to write about Central Africa, co-editing Colonial Rule in Africa (1979) and Colonial Rule and Regional Imbalance in Central Africa (1983). He also co-edited Urbanism Past and Present from 1975 to 1985. In later years he focused on historical demography and public health, co-editing Demography from Scanty Evidence: Central Africa in the Colonial Era (1990).
Fetter died of cancer in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 2017, at the age of 78.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 09:28 (CET).