This ambitious book draws on a wide range of sources, from oral history to anthropology and documentary history, to review current knowledge about the people who lived in what we now know as Liberia from the earliest times up to the nineteenth century. Intended as a corrective to a historiography of Liberia that has focused disproportionately on the written history of Americo-Liberian elites, it aims to create ‘a new, more fully embracing understanding’ of the country's past and its national identity looking forward.

A second aim is to tell this story from what Burrowes calls an African perspective, which in this case is defined as avoiding periodizations based on European history, and also self-publishing the book based on a Kickstarter campaign to avoid editorial interference by foreign publishers or funders. The majority of donors were Liberians from a range of different backgrounds. The author writes that ‘no people can expect to get a full history of their ancestors’ trials and triumphs until they are prepared to write, pay for and ultimately read that history’. The preface roots the origins of this book in the author's upbringing in Liberia, as well as his long career as one of Liberia's leading historians. This book should thus be read as a personal journey as much as a work of scholarship.

The organization of the book is roughly chronological. The first six chapters rely primarily on archaeological and environmental evidence, along with oral histories, to outline the broad trends of West African history from before the desertification of the Sahara. It reviews the histories of the people who came to occupy Liberia, including the Gola, the Dei and the Kru, and their migrations from other regions between the fifth and eleventh centuries. Depending on the evidence available, the chapters range widely, from trade and production to religious and political history. Perhaps appropriately, it is not always easy to distinguish between wider regional histories and those specific to the ancestors of Liberians.

In the second half of the book, the accounts of early European merchants and explorers in the region they called the Grain Coast or Windward Coast are added to the evidence base. Burrowes reads across these sources, pairing them with oral histories or anthropological works, to examine the impact of new coastal trading opportunities on existing trade routes. Chapters 7 and 8 examine the rise and fall of the Sudanic empires, Mali and Songhai, and the Mande and Malinke migrations.

Chapters 10 and 11 focus more particularly on the expansion of the Atlantic trade, and provide useful reviews of some key primary accounts of the region, which include not only trade and production but also clothing and cultural rituals. These chapters are a valuable overview of the available evidence during this period, and thus a useful starting point for students looking to do research using these sources. Chapter 12 moves forward in time, focusing on the slave trade, combining quantitative evidence from the Slave Voyages database with lists of names from particular ships, following a pattern in the chapter as a whole of pairing larger trends with compelling contemporary pictures of the human suffering generated by the trade.

The final chapters take a step backwards and situate the history of Liberia and West Africa within broader global trends. Chapter 13, for example, compares living standards in medieval and early modern West Africa with those of Europe and Asia, challenging the notion that living standards in Africa were lower. Chapter 14 focuses on the fluidity of societies and the ways in which different cultural influences moved between world regions.

With such broad ambitions, it is perhaps inevitable that the book misses some opportunities. Discussions of European history and, in particular, the comparison of global living standards in medieval and early modern times fail to make use of a rich historiography in this area that has emerged in the last two decades. Better engagement with this work would have allowed for more rigorous comparisons between West Africa and other parts of the world. Instead, the book relies on stylized facts primarily drawn from ‘grand narrative’ works by Wallerstein and Braudel, which are by now somewhat dated. This makes the analysis less convincing than it could be, and the book potentially more difficult to use in teaching.

The self-publication of this volume, while well motivated, has come at some cost in terms of the clarity of its presentation. It could have benefited from a strong editorial hand at certain points, either to fix errors in fact (‘AD’ and ‘BC’ are occasionally confused, for example) or to avoid repetitions of sentences or source extracts between chapters. There are times when opinions are mixed with statements based on evidence. A larger set of questions comes from the points raised in the preface about publication and the ownership of national histories. The very valuable emphasis on bringing a Liberian perspective to its history should not displace the potential gains from international scholarly collaborations. Despite these issues, there is much to be admired in a pioneering effort to find a new balance between these imperatives.

Overall, this book makes for compelling reading and is a valuable contribution to Liberian history.