This short but densely argued book originated in a series of public lectures at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard. The three main chapters address ‘Africa and’, respectively, ‘capitalism’, ‘empire’ and ‘the nation-state’. The book distils and selectively enlarges upon elements from Fred Cooper's extraordinarily productive career to date. The preface succinctly and deftly situates the reader in the intellectual context of the 1960s and 1970s. It was in the latter decade that Cooper began his trilogy of books on the history of labour on the east coast of Africa. The capitalism chapter proceeds in part from that monographic research as well as from the continuing succession of wider debates. The empire chapter draws on Cooper's sole- and joint work on colonialism in Africa and on the world history of empire. The final substantive chapter, despite having ‘Africa’ in its title, is devoted specifically to French West Africa, and makes use of the author's recent archival research, which has given rise to another book that appeared the same year, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton University Press, 2014).

The capitalism chapter is packed with Cooper's characteristic erudition and insight, but its themes are rather left behind in the rest of the book. The chapter on empire makes the instructive move of considering both the larger pre-colonial states and European colonialism in Africa as empires, devoting equal space to each. He brings out well the imperial character of the likes of Songhay and Asante, presiding as they did over explicitly different categories of territory and subjects. The analysis perhaps works less well for the Zulu kingdom, which surely had at least an (admittedly unfinished) project of creating a homogeneous ‘national’ identity. Cooper makes a connection between indigenous models of multi-layered political structure and European empires: showing that in the minds of certain West African intellectuals, both at the beginning and near the end of colonial rule, there was a case for self-ruled African polities existing under a British or French umbrella.

This links with the nation-state chapter, which attacks the teleological assumption that empire was bound to give way to the nation-state. Cooper emphasises that as late as 1957, many of the African leaders in French Africa – most notably Léopold Senghor in Senegal but even, among others, Sékou Touré in Guinea – feared a breakup of French West Africa on independence, believing that each ‘nation’ would be individually powerless. Rather, they wanted the former French colonies to retain a federal unity, with each other and, beyond that, with France – with full citizenship for all Africans. At the time, the ‘balkanization’ that actually occurred in 1960 (Senghor's term) seemed far from unavoidable, and the price of a formal qualification on independence seemed preferable to penurious and isolated sovereignty. The argument is well made for French West Africa. Cooper does not discuss how representative that experience was for Africa as a whole. To take the obvious counter-example, in declaring ‘Nigeria’, the British, like the French next door, established a territorial entity much larger than those they had conquered. But in this case the post-independence problems arose not from the balkanisation of the potential super-state that the colonialists had demarcated, but from the opposite: its preservation, albeit without participation in any counterpart to the Franco-African federal union that the likes of Senghor had envisaged. Still, Cooper's moral remains: the ‘naturalisation’ of the nation-state as the only normal and acceptable type of independent polity, happened only relatively recently, was by no means inevitable – and may prove ephemeral.

This is an excellent study. For those who have not read much of Cooper's work before, it serves as a valuable introduction. For those familiar with his formidable oeuvre, it does not disappoint. Anyone interested in African politics and history should read it. As a postscript, a complaint to Harvard University Press: reading this thickly annotated work properly requires keeping the book open in two places at the same time. For the careful reader, it is a pain that Cooper's distinguished publishers use endnotes when footnotes require the same number of clicks.