In this volume, Adrian S. Wisnicki analyzes British expeditionary literature to produce new perspectives on African social and political history. Wisnicki focuses on the activities of British explorers in the nineteenth century and on trade and politics in East and Central Africa. Wisnicki vividly analyses explorers’ reports that were generated during their fieldwork, including diaries, cartographies, and reminiscences.

The author's preamble to the book is illustrative. He writes that his book ‘examines the impact of non-western cultural, political, and social forces and agencies, and the production of British expeditionary literature’ (xv). In this effort, the author considers ‘diverse materials’, especially from what he calls the ‘expeditionary archive’, to study this ‘specific time period’ in Africa, as well as the regions through which explorers traveled and which inspired their writings (xv).

The author divides the British expeditionary literature into two kinds, namely factual and fictitious accounts. The factual accounts dominated the activities of David Livingstone, Richard Francis Burton, John Hanning Speke, Samuel White Baker, Verney Lovett Cameron, and Henry Morton Stanley. The author argues that fictional accounts, as exemplified by Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness on the Belgian colonial activities in the Congo, are useful to understanding the wider genre. Wisnicki notes that ‘the intercultural strategies of analyses . . . developed for non-fiction expeditionary texts can likewise be applied to relevant fiction where representation grows out of on-the-spot experience’ (134).

In its approach, therefore, Wisnicki's Fieldwork of Empire is a study of British imperialism in Africa. The mid-Victorian empire of Britain, reeling out from the vestiges of the Atlantic slave trade, sought out ways to integrate Africa into its mercantile and humanitarian activities. To achieve these ends, British policymakers in the mid-Victorian era encouraged African exploration through private and official partnership. Institutional sponsors, such as the Royal Geographical Society, as well as various publishers provided the platforms for the dissemination of the writings of these explorers in various forms, including scientific journals and ‘popular narratives’ (4). These accounts revealed a great deal about the transformations of nineteenth-century African societies, such as dynastic struggles, wars, the intensification of the Arab slave trade in East Africa, and the devastating effects of Belgian rule in the Congo, all of which these explorers described. By publishing their experiences and providing maps of these regions, these explorers provided information that helped to advance the eventual British colonialization of East and Central Africa.

The dominating figure of Livingstone in Fieldwork of Empire is notable. Wisnicki states that Livingstone's Missionary Travels provides a major framework for the understanding of the British expeditionary literature.Footnote ¹ Missionary Travels was effective in delineating both geographic and geological boundaries of Africa, which helped to drive the British reading public, as well as the sponsors of these expeditions, to support British expansion overseas and interfere in African affairs. Livingstone's work, to a large extent, explicates an emerging colonial treatise which grew out of the crisis of the Industrial Revolution and drove British colonization of Africa. Apart from Livingstone's towering figure, other explorers such as Burton, Speke, and Baker also emerge prominently in the book. Through what was called the East Africa Expedition (EAE) and other institutions, these contemporaries of Livingstone followed in his footsteps and exerted major influence on the efforts to find the source of the Nile and understand the slave trade in East Africa. Their fieldnotes provide a major link between British experiences in Africa in the nineteenth century and Conrad's depiction of the repressions of Belgian rule in the Congo.

The book, to a large extent, is a prosopographical study of African history through the activities of British explorers. However, a problem of the book lies in its great historical detail, which presumably would be quite technical to nonspecialists. Wisnicki does make an effective case that British expeditionary literature can be used to study African social and political history. Many accounts on these explorers have been read and analyzed by a number of scholars with scant attention paid to the way in which they constitute a specific genre, that of British expeditionary literature. Wisnicki's Fieldwork of Empire is timely and will deepen further studies of this nature, particularly in other regions of Africa.