This book is a welcome addition to the histories of mixed-descent communities in Britain's former Central African dependencies, Nyasaland, Northern and Southern Rhodesia, modern-day Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. In this well-organized, carefully researched book, Christopher J. Lee charts the histories of what he describes as ‘multiracial’ Africans from 1910 to the 1960s. Paying particular attention to Malawi, Lee traces the emergence of mixed-descent Anglo-African, Euro-African, and Eurafrican communities, as well as their economic, political, and social aspirations and disappointments.

Unreasonable Histories is divided into three parts, with an impressive bibliography. The introduction begins by mapping the geographical boundaries and sociopolitical histories of Britain's Central African dependencies. Against this historical backdrop, Lee sets the stage for his key focus on the ‘relative disregard’ for multiracial lives during the colonial period in British Central Africa and postcolonial scholarship and African Studies. He suggests that multiracial lives are excluded and rendered ‘invisible’ by ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ discourse in colonial and postcolonial scholarship, and the politics of African nationalism in African Studies (pp. 10, 13). In the introduction he makes the case for a methodological framework drawing upon the concepts of ‘genealogical imagination’, ‘colonial kinship’, ‘nativism’, and ‘unreasonable histories’ to chronicle multiracial lives in colonial Central Africa. In sum, colonial rule was marked by racial and cultural differences through racial hierarchal configurations of ‘native’ and ‘non-native’. Multiracial Africans problematized these racial markers in their petitions for official recognition of legal, social, and political entitlements based on European descent. In Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe respectively, multiracial Africans used the self-descriptors ‘Anglo-African’, ‘Euro-African’, and ‘Eurafrican’ to signify affective genealogical and kinship connections, and political and social distinctions from ‘native’ communities.

The chapters in Part One, ‘Histories Without Groups’, focus primarily upon Nyasaland; nonetheless, they set the tone for Lee's wider engagement of the political and legal realms that affected the status, education, and employment of the region's multiracial communities. Lee skillfully juxtaposes his fieldwork and archival findings to present an example of ‘histories without groups’ and ‘unreasonable histories’. He notes that these ‘histories are unreasonable insofar that they underscore methodological challenges’ and that ‘histories without groups provide a tentative solution, evincing social and political conditions of risk, exclusion, and suppression’ (p. 25).

In Chapter One, Lee notes the emphasis upon the individual rather than the group historical experience in the ‘genealogical imaginations’ and ‘colonial kinships’ he finds through oral histories and family memories. He writes that ‘many family stories were anchored by arrivals and settlements, the coming of a European or Indian man … and his putative marriage to an African woman’ (p. 45). Consequently, illegitimacy was an issue persistently encountered by multiracial people.

In Chapters Two and Three, Lee draws upon epistolary evidence to reveal the personal lives and agency of the letter writers. For example, he sketches the story of Adaima, an African woman who had a tumultuous four-year relationship with an unnamed white man, the father of her mixed-descent son. Lee also uses epistolary evidence about and from Anglo-African children to reveal their agency, poverty, and despair as they sought financial assistance from the colonial administration and their absent white fathers.

Part Two, ‘Non-Native Questions’, traces the interconnected histories of Nyasaland, Southern, and Northern Rhodesia. Chapter Four examines a local court case in Nyasaland, Carr v. Karim, in which the presiding judge, Haythorne Reed, ruled that Karim, an African of Indian descent, was properly classified not as ‘native’ but rather as ‘non-native of Indian origin’ (p. 96). This case was the catalyst for the Colonial Office's unsuccessful attempt to create a single unifying category of ‘native’ in Britain's African territories. Chapter Five addresses the legal debates during the interwar period and various Northern and Southern Rhodesia government commissions established to investigate the status, education, employment, and racial categorization of multiracial people.

In Part Three, ‘Colonial Kinships’, Lee engages with the region-specific ways mixed-descent people understood and negotiated their identities in relation to white officials and settler society, and with how the colonial designation ‘native’ affected multiracial communities’ everyday lives. Chapters Six and Seven cover individual multiracial people's political activism in the 1930s and 1940s. From the late 1950s, Anglo-Africans, Euro-Africans, and Eurafricans joined forces with other marginalized groups such as immigrant Cape Coloureds and Indians, to generate new forms of political action under the ‘Coloured’ banner.

In the conclusion, ‘Genealogies of Colonialism’, Lee observes that multiracial communities ‘possess shallow histories that lack longstanding cultural traditions and ongoing social reproduction’ (p. 238). But perhaps rather than being thought of as shallow, these histories might be thought of as a ‘recent’ living phenomenon that continues to evolve, socially and culturally reproduced by contemporary generations of multiracial Africans. Although Lee does not characterize his work as ‘critical mixed-race studies’, Unreasonable Histories fits well into this emerging interdisciplinary field, as it considers how races were/are embodied and how bodies were/are racialized. Undoubtedly, ‘mixed-racedness’ is distinctive to discrete geographical locations and historical moments, yet it is also an experience common across the globe.