Christopher Lee's Unreasonable Histories is a theoretical tour de force, opening up new epistemological possibilities in historical thinking through its investigation of the lived experiences of and discourses about multiracial peoples in twentieth-century (ca. 1910–ca. 1960) colonial British Central Africa, the colonies of Southern and Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, now Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Zambia. Lee couches the book as a study of racial thought and the politics of racialization and the ways these themes informed various realms of life: sexual behavior, social identification, political arguments and social policies, urban planning, poverty, conceptions of childhood, and “colonial common sense” (4–5). He focuses on a statistically small group, people of African and European or Asian descent, about 2,500–10,000 people across the three colonies between 1911 and 1956 (16). Colonial states’ and societies’ racism categorized the majority of Africans as of “native” status. Nevertheless, varied forms of interracial sexual relationships, mainly between African women and European men or Colored men (of mixed Khoisan, South Asian, and Bantu ancestry), produced children. Though rarely socially or legally recognized by their fathers, as children and adults these offspring made claims of genealogy to their white or “nonnative” fathers. Multiracial persons variably identified themselves as Anglo-African, Eurafrican, Indo-African, Colored, and Euro-African. Individually and in collective action via organizations, newspapers, petitions, and letters to colonial officials, multiracial children and adults argued for entitlement to receive access to educational opportunities, housing, and legal status above that of “natives.”

Lee explores how to write a history in which sources are dispersed, fragmented, thin, and chronologically shallow, and of a people who are statistically small in number. His arguments are both empirical and epistemological. He argues that the history of multiracial Africans has been largely ignored by African studies because both colonial and postcolonial nativisms have rendered the African historical actor as black. Lee proposes “to offer alter-native subjectivities” (10) that reveal how multiracial Africans formed “new forms of peoplehood” (13). This question of how scholars and historical actors conceive of “peoplehood” is at the center of the book. More specifically, the book is organized into three parts around the concept of “unreasonableness.” This term, Lee elaborates, encapsulates the ways in which the articulations of multiracial peoplehood presented challenges to British imperial governance and to scholars’ normalization of African history.

In part one, Lee focuses on the time period of 1910s and 1920s and the question of how to write “histories without groups,” the history of people without a precolonial past and whose identities were born out of colonial rule. In chapter 1 he examines how interracial sexual relationships unfolded and were perceived by African and British societies. Interestingly enough, Lee argues that precolonial mores of transregional marriage across Southern and East-Central Africa provided the springboard for transracial relationships. Gossip and rumor are the most prevalent source materials about the existence of interracial relations, otherwise hidden from public records, and marked by asymmetrical relationships of power between African women and European men. Chapter 2 is particularly poignant, and Lee provides a model for how to mine a single primary source. The chapter recreates verbatim and analyzes an undated handwritten letter, housed at the National Archives of Malawi, by an unidentified European man about an African woman, identified as Adaima, who lived in his household. Lee interprets the letter writer to be variably Adaima's master, lover, benefactor, and abuser, concluding that she is the mother of their child, who is the focus of the letter. Lee uses this account to debunk the “white peril” narratives of black men raping white women that were so prevalent in British imperial discourses and forefronts this more common, yet hidden practice, of white men's sexual relationships with African women. Lee focuses chapter 3 on children and childhood, analyzing the letters of and about multiracial children and their claims for financial assistance and schooling from their fathers or colonial states. Debates about British moral obligations towards these children extended to England. Local administrators sometimes wrote letters to fathers asking them to provide money for their children and at other times denied claims by multiracial Africans. Lee emphasizes how these sources reveal both the agency and vulnerability that children exhibited.

Lee focuses part two on the 1920s–1950s and on legal policies surrounding the question of native or nonnative status, the legal categories that codified racial identity, citizenship, access to housing, and mobility in all three colonies. He opens chapter 4 with the exploration a 1929 court case over the seemingly insignificant question of a personal debt in Nyasaland. The multiracial litigant's claim for his case to be adjudicated as a nonnative launched debates across the region and in London about whether multiracial persons could be of nonnative status or a completely separate intermediate category. Colonial nativism, a core terminology of colonial rule, was an ongoing process and not a fait accompli, Lee argues. In chapter 5, he analyzes varied colonial commissions launched in the 1930s–1950s in Northern and Southern Rhodesia about social issues such as poverty, education, and employment. Lee homes in on how these commissions conceptualized these issues pertaining to multiracial Africans and the processes of racial state formation.

Part three contains three chapters that focus on how the collective actions of multiracial Africans—in advocacy organizations, newspaper articles, and petitions to government officials—crafted self-definitions of multiracial identity and local meanings of colonial citizenship. While protesting against the racism of colonial societies, multiracial Africans avowed racist thinking of being superior to other Africans. In chapter 6, Lee interprets the Anglo-African Association in Nyasaland that emerged between the wars as an expression of community coherence of multiracial peoples, while in chapter 7 he shifts to Southern Rhodesia, in which a fragile coalition of Colored and Eurafricans formed the Eurafrican Patriotic Society and published the newspaper Rhodesian Tribute. The society's cooperation with the Anglo-African Association of Nyasaland, Lee argues, signifies transregional and transcolonial multiracial ties. In chapter 8, Lee turns to Northern Rhodesia in the 1940s–1950s and analyzes the creation of a neighborhood in Lusaka called Thorne Park. Financed by the colonial state and providing subsidized rents, the neighborhood came about from the Eura-African Association of Lusaka's campaign for urban housing of European standards.

In his conclusion, Lee elaborates further on the question of colonial and postcolonial nativism. Lee argues that opening up African colonial history beyond these analytical categories also has implications for thinking about sweeping political and social change across postcolonial Southern Africa.

Lee is astonishingly erudite in engaging varied theoretical tool kits from the political theory of Antonio Gramsci to the imperial cultural history of Anne Stoler to the critical analysis of the term “native” by Mahmood Mamdani. Lee is also a character in the book, with personal reflections, encounters during fieldwork, and the first person “I” interspersed throughout. Clever in theoretical conceptualization and writing, Lee creates sophisticated new concepts repeated throughout the book such as the idea of “uncustomary history” and “uncustomary communities,” which are terminologies that critique how many scholars have conceived of African societies as organized into ethnic groups regulated by customary practices. Empirical thinness generates the book's strength but is also a limitation. Lee conflates the existence of multiracial advocacy groups with coherent multiracial communities and identities. Reflecting the availability of sources, most of its historical actors are men. He could have made further impact with “gendering men,” investigating how ideas of masculinity have been constructed and constrained, as historian Luise L. White called for decades ago. Nevertheless, this book makes important interventions in African history and also broadly in histories of the family, imperialism, citizenship, and racial thought. Providing new taxonomies, theoretical frameworks, and innovative methodologies, it will undoubtedly be the launching pad for novel research questions and creative thinking about the myriad expressions of peoplehood in Africa and globally.