In the current neo-nationalist world of Brexit and making America great again, Fred Cooper’s thoroughly historical collection of essays on political (and thus partisan and inherently divisive) identities in an interconnected world is a timely reflection on the promise of contingencies and connections. The three core chapters of this small book originated as MacMillan-Stewart Lectures at Harvard’s W. E. B. Du Bois Institute in 2012; Cooper takes Du Bois’ 1946 book, The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part which Africa Has Played in World History, as his text from which to examine Africa’s places within worlds that have changed over the recent millennium and a half through capitalism, empire, and the nation-state. The latter two are a historical sequence, with the turning point from a world of empires to a world of nation-states coming at the very moment that Du Bois was envisioning a post-conflict future for Africa. Cooper considers the war-wearied world at that moment in time and imagines its openness to new ways of co-existence. His aim is to escape the teleological tendencies to naturalize the nation-state as the inevitable model of political organization in an independent Africa and to contemplate the additional paths then in play but not taken: continental or global pan-Africanism, confederation with European partners, regionalism, socialist globalism, and others.

The brevity of the published lectures format allows Cooper to weave together arguments he has developed, often at length, in the rich corpus of his many, always-thoughtful, publications around a solidly historical core logic of indeterminate possibilities. Faced with this array of possibilities, human actors have contended to nudge the contexts in which they have found themselves, well beyond anyone’s individual control, in seemingly favorable directions (for the moment). The vignettes balance an acknowledgment of the recent asymmetry of Africa’s vulnerability to the world’s capitalist wealth and military power against Africans’ own abilities to “exploit fissures in structures of power” (9) and to raise the costs of dominance above the perceived returns to the dominant. In other words, he follows the dialectical engagement of the dynamics of history within Africa and the pressures of the world in which its peoples have always been significant parts. I thought of, but did not find cited, James C. Scott’s sociology of asymmetry.

“Africa and Capitalism,” the opening lecture, raises the epistemological question of how we might productively understand Africa’s place in the world economy, whether by the terms of the institutional structures of capitalism itself or by notions of value and the strategies of attaining it that lie in Africa’s own past. Africa’s great diversity raises the further conceptual issue of whether the continent is a viable unit of analysis, either by itself or as a viable contrast with other world regions, including Europe. Though Cooper is at pains to complicate this relationship, emphasizing the weakness of the European colonial presence, he gives less attention to the African dynamics that produced generations of facilitators, from the seventeenth-century suppliers of slaves through post-colonial “gatekeeping” elites brokering flows of funds and commodities between national economies and international capital, often to their and their clients’ personal advantage.

“Africa and Empire” reflects on the upside of colonial weakness as the dynamics of empire: empires are inexpensive ways of channeling local dynamics to the benefit of external interests. He begins by citing Axum and medieval Ghana as examples of Africans’ participation in a world that he has elsewhere characterized as an age of imperial regimes that overlay ongoing local historical engagements. This participation produced entities that may be seen as pluri-lingual and multi-religious, with the component communities left to manage their internal affairs but responsible for mobilizing, or paying tribute, for common purposes, often the plunder of massive military might, suitably distributed, or its necessary converse, common defense against others similarly inclined. This image of imperial polities as dynamic composites has been reviving interest even in the hoary early modern Lisbon-Madrid-London-Paris-centered regimes, seen increasingly, and productively, as multi-centric networks, drawing their vitality as much from linking local dynamics as from directives emanating from Europe. For Africa, British “indirect rule” and French “association” were characteristically monarchical and republican colonial-era phrasings of the principle of these multi-layered imperial composites.

“Africa and the Nation-State” steps back from the usual teleology of seeing nation-states as natural outcomes of twentieth-century decolonization to consider how the world of empires that Du Bois saw ending in 1946 dissolved into today’s world of nation-states. Cooper’s sophisticated historical logic finds seemingly novel sequels emerging from the heritage of the past, in this case the smaller historical communities operative as components attempting to go it on their own. The tone of this chapter shifts from impressionistic, though always informed, glimpses of aspects of the modern history of the continent to a concentration on the politics and personalities of the political leaders of western components of l’Afrique Occidentale Française (AOF), with selected comments on the subsequent fortunes of the resulting small, territorially bounded, and economically fragile political entities. Between 1945 and the year of independence (1960), these leaders worked through the other possibilities inherent in their pasts contemplated by Du Bois to bring about the future nation-states of Côte d’Ivoire, Guinée, Sénégal, and what became Mali. Cooper does not see the nation-state as inherently incompatible with partnership with France, or with the European Union, in some hypothetical late-twentieth-century polity. This is not unlike his understanding of earlier empires, as sets of multi-layered asymmetrical compatibilities rather than the existing nominally—but not actually—coequal nation-states locked in competition by the fiction of their respective absolute sovereignties. The tone of the book is not without irony.

A short conclusion adds a further level of meaning to the title’s promise of connectedness—“Africa in the World”—over the competitiveness of the theoretical isolation of the sovereign state. The book’s structuring theme accents the understanding gained though a historical epistemology of human creativity over the constraints inherent in approaches through abstract structures. These institutions, including the “states” themselves, are after all merely historical creations of particular times. From this perspective, he concludes with Du Boisian faith in historical possibility rather than accepting as structural rigidity what has already transpired.