This book is concerned with the various ways in which African countries integrate into the global economy, and with how African commodity chains and the institutional regulations within countries interface with governance structures and demands by international buyers. It is an edited collection that presents empirical findings by notable researchers in economic geography, commodity studies and African economic development. The book compels a rethinking of African economies in the academic and international policy literature. While this edited work does not attempt a ‘political’ project in defence of African economies against the tropes of developmentalism or isolation per se, it does argue towards a more critical understanding of globalisation in order to shift it away from its North-centric roots.

The book as a whole makes statements about what systems of governance mean for production systems in Africa; how domestic structures promote or inhibit globalisation; how diverse local and national economies are affected by globalised trade processes; how international quality standards transform domestic commodity processing industries; and how these all contribute to variegated and uneven experiences of globalisation. It argues that globalised African commodity flows are in line with economic pathways that are inevitably linked to global capital and international retail transformation. Yet, at the same time, the case studies add nuance to this general argument and show how, in fact, there are processes of marginalisation, exclusion and reinforced negative impacts of globalisation.

More specifically, the various chapters in the book draw on a global value chains approach and each advances it in significant ways. The case studies range from coffee, cotton and citrus to music, textiles and transport, and together they present various facets of how African economies globalise. By broadening the discussion so that non-agricultural commodities are also included, the book provides important insights into different forms of globalised integration. One of the key contributions is that various authors begin to grapple with both temporal changes in global value chains, and the interplay between governance and agency in these chains. The chapters on transport and music offer a welcome perspective on global value chains and governance. These cases show the more complex interactions between international investment, regulations of quality, and local knowledge and infrastructure.

Another key contribution is that authors draw out challenging questions about the way governance happens, the way economic changes (in both the global and the domestic policy arena) restructure how commodities make their way to consumer markets, and the need to rework the global value/commodity chains approach. For instance, Neils Fold and Stefano Ponte's chapter on global coffee chains shows that certain states continue to control specific activities in the chain (marketing and roasting), and the same is true of Marianne Larsen's chapter on cotton, where states and other non-state surveyors control quality bureaus. Charles Mather's chapter on citrus argues that producer costs threaten to destabilise the global citrus market. These chapters draw out salient themes from their respective cases and each concludes by challenging more normative accounts of global value chain analysis. Yet the questions and controversies raised in these contributions could have made for a more critical conclusion to the book. Although some of the broader issues and the conceptual roadmap are indeed detailed in a substantive second chapter (which provides a review of the pieces and a discussion of the key themes), more could have been made of how the evidence restructures our understanding of globalisation and African economies. In short, the book would have benefited from a more integrated conclusion. There could for instance have been more of a conversation, theoretically, about how the stand-alone chapters contribute to the global value chains (GVC) approach, and how domestic agency reworks normative accounts of regulation and governance.

The lack of a critical conclusion suggests that globalisation is a process that happens to a place, as if it is an external process affecting Africa. Consequently, the book does not answer some of the critical questions raised or implied in the individual chapters: what do local institutions and state interventions, particularly in quality control (or management), tell us about globalisation? What threatens to destabilise global value chains, and what do these destabilising factors tell us about how African commodity chains (dis)integrate? What are the forms of national/domestic governance that challenge the normative conventions of the global regulatory framework?

Despite this, Globalization and Restructuring of African Commodity Flows is a crucial text, because it inserts African economies into a discussion about globalisation, and analyses some of the varied and uneven effects of globalisation on African economies and institutions. It is useful for economic geographers, those doing work on global value chains with a focus on Africa, and development studies experts given the increasing global integration of African countries. Perhaps most importantly, the edited collection bridges the theory/policy divide, because it offers a nuanced perspective that has implications for African economic development policy, agribusiness innovation, and otherwise North-centric economic geography.