This book is about Accra, one of West Africa's great coastal cities in the second quarter of the twentieth century. The author captures some of the vivid particularity of the city in her first few pages, which make one regret what presumably was the parsimony of the Press in limiting her to only four illustrations. There are so many fine, available photographs of the city that illustrate its rapid physical expansion in the last 150 years. Sackeyfio-Lenoch's focus is upon the politics of an African town that was growing very fast. Its population more than tripled from about 41,000 to 133,000 in the period she deals with and that population was becoming more and more multi-cultural. Accra and its population bore the burdens as well as enjoyed the benefits of living in the capital city of a relatively affluent colony. The author is much less concerned with anti-colonial politics in this period, a subject which already received a great deal of scholarly attention since the 1960s, than she is with the ways in which a cluster of chieftaincies of the original Ga-speaking population of the area contested and sometimes resolved disputes about authority in a little town that had grown into a major city in two generations.

Although it was a colonial capital and home to the country's legislature, its most significant law courts, a cathedral, its largest hospital, and the Governor's residence, the day-to-day management of the town remained in large measure in chiefly hands. Colonial authority was scared off by the complexity and volatility of urban politics in the Gold Coast and accordingly hesitant, even cowardly, about intervention in many aspects of urban affairs. Sackeyfio-Lenoch's account of the robust and, at the same time, subtle politics concerning overlapping jurisdictions, succession to chieftaincy, rights to property, and keeping colonial authority at arm's length demonstrates why that should have been so. The politics of these Ga chieftaincies, so different from those of their Akan-speaking neighbours, constitute an historical cat's cradle and only a few scholars, such as S. S. Quarcoopome and John Parker, have dared to untangle them. These chieftaincies are tough to work on, not least because, throughout the period this book addresses, chieftaincy was itself being constantly redefined and reconfigured. The author is to be congratulated for bringing some clarity out of intimidating complexity.

The transformation of the city and hence the transformation of pre-colonial forms of authority in this area of the coast owed everything to its economic transformation. It was an administrative hub, a magnet for traders and for economic migrants from the Mediterranean, Europe, and many parts of West Africa. Urban space, and the property that was built upon it, was a key resource, and struggles over not only ownership but also the meanings of ownership were inevitable and lay at the heart of the politics of chieftaincy. Given the centrality of property in her account of chieftaincy politics, the book disappoints in failing to provide readers with a necessary background account of the city's economic history. It is hard, for example, to get any sense of the impact of major shifts in the world economy on property values and rents in Accra. The Depression, which is simply ignored, presumably reduced rents and property values just as the conjuncture of the Second World War, which dramatically increased employment and swelled the city's population, is mentioned (pp. 119–20) but without any discussion of its implications for rising land and property values. Even more surprising is the lack of discussion of the implications for property values of the Accra earthquake of June 1939, which destroyed or damaged a significant amount of the city's housing and, despite killing fewer than 20 people, made many homeless for a long time. Wartime shortages of building materials delayed rebuilding and many endured the rigours of temporary accommodation for years.

The author is surely right to emphasise the economic and hence the political significance of urban property in Accra. If she neglects to tell us much about property values and property-derived wealth, she also has far too little to say about who actually inherits property after a death. For example, is the long-term dilapidation of so many of Accra's once grand houses the result of partible inheritance? To what extent did some Ga, like some Duala, become rentier elite in this period? Over reliant upon normative ethnographic accounts, she tends to tell us what should happen rather than what did happen. Just as importantly, she does not tackle the ways in which those normative accounts have been constructed. In this respect it is a pity that while she cites Kathryn Firmin-Sellers in her bibliography, there is no discussion of Firmin-Sellers' very different approach to the history of property rights in the Ga state.

There is a good deal of fascinating new data drawn from written and oral sources in this valuable book, which makes a welcome addition to our knowledge of Ghanaian history. Every contribution to a historiography of Ghana that is less Akan-centric is doubly welcome.