In 1986 the British historians David Killingray and Richard Rathbone edited a pioneering collection entitled Africa and the Second World War (Palgrave Macmillan). For the small but productive band of scholars who worked on the topic, it became the “pack leader” to a surprisingly large number of articles on aspects of Africa and the war that appeared in an eclectic range of journals from the 1970s onward. It also acted as a pan-continental reference for the monographs on single African countries during the conflict. Taken all together, these works make up a substantial body of material that has been published on Africa’s role in World War II. Nevertheless, while specialist historians know of this corpus, general histories of the war remain stubbornly impervious to the role of the colonial world in the conflict and its impact upon colonial populations. And beyond that, public knowledge of Africa’s war is miniscule or nonexistent.

So the appearance, thirty years after the publication of Africa and the Second World War, of a new multi-authored volume is a landmark event. Africa and World War II—the title reflecting the book’s American origins—is a superb companion to the earlier volume. At twenty-six chapters it is also longer, and in terms of coverage, broader. It is a new champion for the significant role played by Africa in the war and will help reinvigorate the study of this subject. Most important, it will lend considerable weight to the push to rebalance the general history of World War II so that its impact on the colonial world, along with the extremely important role played by African people, resources, and infrastructure in the war’s prosecution, is properly acknowledged.

The volume’s major strength is that its chapters take broad themes (such as labor) and examine them across Africa and the various European imperial divisions that pertained at the time. Countries and regions featured include Cameroon, Equatorial Africa, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa, French West Africa, Kenya, Portuguese Africa, Sierra Leone (Freetown, specifically), Tanzania, Eritrea, Niger, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Uganda. This breadth means that when it comes to “flying the flag” for Africa’s role in World War II the volume has greater traction than the many single-colony articles and books. It is also impressive in the ways in which it deepens our knowledge of the war. Even specialists will find new research here, especially on issues relating to the production of food and raw materials (including rubber, coal, and timber), both for the war effort and for subsistence, and the labor that it involved. Its major themes are the military and labor utility of Africans for the war effort, and the experiences of African soldiers and civilians recruited for local and overseas war-related purposes (including the plight of disabled ex-servicemen). There is also a chapter on the experience of African American servicemen stationed in Africa, one on French African soldiers in German prisoner of war camps, and one on Ethiopian women’s patriot organizations. Another key theme is the effects of war on African societies and economies, and this embraces matters of gender as well as race, with chapters relating to masculinity, colonial fears regarding African soldiers’ interaction with French women, and sex workers in British West Africa.

The historiography of World War II is at a crossroads. It can continue to focus overwhelmingly on the battles, strategies, personalities, and home fronts of the major Western belligerents. Or it can branch off and embrace the war histories of other regions and peoples, and get properly to grips with the conflict’s extraordinary globality. Africa and World War II is a significant book, offering a genuine advance in the field of scholarship relating to Africa and World War II, and it will contribute to the emergence of a new history of the conflict that puts Africa in its proper place.