Rastafari: A Very Short Introduction

Ennis B. Edmonds's Rastafari, A Very Short Introduction, published by Oxford University Press in 2012, is part of Oxford's peer reviewed Very Short Introductions series, written by a scholar of Caribbean religion covering Rastafari's origins in 1930s Jamaica, its theology centered on Haile Selassie, and its development into a global movement. Its strength is Oxford's own editorial standard for the series, a genuine specialist writing a compressed, accurate synthesis rather than a general publisher summarizing secondhand, giving reliable grounding even in a short format. Its limit is the format itself, a very short introduction is deliberately compact, so it covers Rastafari's major currents, Nyabinghi, Bobo Ashanti, the Twelve Tribes of Israel, at a survey level rather than in the depth a claim about one specific mansion's internal doctrine or dispute would need, for which a source focused on that particular group serves better than the series overview.