In Wildlife between Empire and Nation in Twentieth-Century Africa, Jeff Schauer notes that studies on wildlife in Africa have been largely framed within three distinct bands of scholarship. In the first cluster of writings, wildlife conservation in Africa was put in place through the actions of a slew of European based trans-national networks between the 1880s and the First World War (1914–1918). Environmental governance in Africa, in other words, was initiated by forces and agents that were external to the continent and drew upon the contexts produced by European colonialism and their expansionary and imperial visions for managing natural worlds. In the second group of writings, it is held that the postwar conservation boom between the 1940s and 1950s proved critical to the setting up of enduring institutional arrangements in Africa for managing wildlife. In the third band of writings, however, the discussions mainly focus on how the global neo-liberal shift spurred innovations such as game ranching and community conservation between the 1970s and 1990s in Africa.

While not intending to radically overturn these somewhat neat narrative schemas, Schauer nonetheless argues that several of the ingredients and causal connections that provide plots lines for discussing wildlife need to be tweaked, reoriented, and reworked. At heart is the claim that the politics of wildlife conservation in Africa can be better understood by discussing them through a series of core themes—administration, militarization, nationalism, science, and the broadening of the constituency for wildlife management. For Schauer, consequently, a fresh reconsideration is required that can be more attentive to “structures, processes, turning points and power relations” rather than “narrating everything that happened” in extensive detail (248). Thus committed to getting his arguments across mostly through illustrative reasoning, Schauer is able to take on a fairly expansive temporal and geographical scale, examining a hundred-year period in five colonies that became sovereign African nations by the latter half of the twentieth century Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Malawi. This large territorial slice, Schauer is keen to point out, is less defined by national boundaries than marked by an ecological contiguity in the stretch of lakes, depressions, and highlands that together comprise the Great Rift Valley, which drops from the north of Kenya to the Muchinga Escarpment in Zambia.

In the first three chapters, Schauer provides a compelling overview of the those he describes as the preservationists, who were particularly influential from the 1890s to well up to the 1920s, in shaping wildlife policies in the Eastern African colonies. These preservationists, with their membership drawn exclusively from European elites, not only were organized as a transnational network—as the Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the Empire, but they also had evolved a fairly cogent claim for protecting wildlife as an aspect of imperial trusteeship. Schauer further argues that through the society, by successfully creating and sustaining the view that the African landscape historically comprised a mix of high game density and uninhabited lands, European colonialists ended up turning hunting into one of the central concerns of the colonial administration.

The need to preserve wildlife as stocks of game for European hunting enthusiasts served to spur a range of colonial interventions such as the eviction of communities from game reserves, the systematic delegitimizing of traditional hunts, the militarization of wildlife administration, and the regulation of Africa's wildlife resources through international accords, conventions, and commitments.

Toward the final years of the 1920s, however, the preservationist narrative was increasingly beginning to get unsettled amid growing anticolonial stirrings in Africa and the eruption of a range of conflicts over the loss of livelihoods. Equally telling was the open and often violent battles during these years between indigenous agricultural and forest communities and the colonial government's wildlife departments. For Schauer, the decades between 1920–1950 rather than being a period of quiescence actually proved to be the years that incubated the notion of conservation. In the subsequent decolonization phase, from the 1950s onward, policies for conservation in Africa by the emergent nationalist leadership, in fact, took precedence over that of the preservationists. For the conservationists, according to Schauer, wildlife was considered a national economic resource that could be sustainably managed and financially harnessed through tourism, for example. Under the rubric of conservation, moreover, nationalist governments were able to restore some amount of local hunting and even temper several of the strict regulations that otherwise prevented communities from accessing resources that were fenced off in parks and game reserves.

From the 1980s onward, the preservationists fought back by attempting to systematically internationalize concerns about Africa's wildlife. Their efforts during this decolonization phase, in essence, were aimed at making the case, especially through neoliberal inspired ideologies, for managing Africa's wildlife as a “global trust” (125), governed through international organizations, global funding regimes and with a battery of experts drawn from the wildlife sciences. And central to this strategy, Schauer points out, was the role of an array of global and local institutions such as the Nuffield Unit of Tropical Animal Ecology, the Serengeti Research Institute, the Tsavo project, the Ford Foundation, the World Bank, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, World Wildlife Fund, and the College of African Wildlife Management. In the final two chapters, Schauer walks us through the varied maneuverings by these global institutions and scientific bodies to further undermine efforts of African national governments and local communities to exercise control over their wildlife.

Wildlife between Empire and Nation makes for interesting reading and provides with a compelling birds-eye perspective on how the politics and policies of wildlife in Africa were subject to varied twists and turns during Eastern Africa's troubled phases of colonialism, nationalism, decolonization, and the recent neoliberal ideological shift. It further underlines the importance of local control over resources while also serving a salutary warning against the idea of managing nature principally as a global trust.