This book is an expanded version of three lectures Frederick Cooper gave at the DuBois Institute at Harvard University in 2012. The author describes them as ‘reflective essays … intended to increase the reader's thirst rather than satisfy it’ (p. ix). Drawing upon a wide range of sources, including the author's own recent scholarship, the essays address an overarching theme of how Africa's relationship to Europe became so ‘asymmetrical’ (p. 9). The first essay explores Africa's relationship to the expanding European capitalist economy, whose power, Cooper argues, Africans both embraced through trade and resisted in its colonial manifestations. Chapter Two describes the racial, economic, and political inequalities in French and British colonies in Africa, concluding cautiously that ‘European colonialism neither systematically remade Africa not systematically exploited its population’ (p. 54). The third essay is more narrowly focused, examining how French West Africa split into autonomous nation-states (rather than the federation many African leaders hoped for), while France became a founding member of what is now called the European Union. Cooper does not think this asymmetry was always bad. The chapter on capitalism, for example, argues that West African cocoa farmers devised land and labor forms that were economically successful, even though distinctively different from those of capitalist Europe.

As one might expect from an eminent historian still in his prime, the essays are sophisticated in their scholarship and sweeping in their geographical and historical range. Cooper shows an impressive command of recent scholarship on Africa, as well as on Asian economic history and the African diaspora. While drawing from research on many parts of the world, his analysis remains balanced and thoughtful. Originality is displayed, for example, in his essay on empires, which examines both precolonial Africa, cited as proof of African capacity for state building, and the later European colonies, cited as proof of European prejudice and perfidy. While Cooper freely admits that the African-ruled empires were conquest states whose benefits went disproportionally to the ruling elite, this reader was left thirsting for most probing comparisons between the two.

The book has its limitations, as the author himself points out. Most limitations are by design, inherent in the brevity of the book and reflecting Cooper's scholarly interests. Other limitations are the product of his choice of themes. Framed around capitalism, imperialism, and postcolonial politics, the perspectives presented are often quite abstract, elitist, and favor top-down analyses. Mature historian that he is, Cooper is aware of this limitation and in places opens the window to perspectives from below, not just in the discussion of cocoa farmers but also in stressing that late colonial movements were not just the creation of nationalist leaders but also the product of grass-roots mobilizations ‘through peasant movements, local healers, kinship group elders, and organizations of women’ (p. 27).

Scholars have every right to frame their topics as they choose. Yet it seems odd to this reader, and perhaps others, that in writing of Africa in the world, Cooper pushes the economic and political processes to the fore, while generally relegating to the rear the massive social and cultural transformations of twentieth-century Africa. Might it not be that the most profound and lasting changes of the 1800s and 1900s was Africans' massive embrace of world religions, international languages, and global educational institutions and curricula? The fact that Europeans abandoned formal religion just as Africans adopted Islam and Christianity preserves the asymmetry of his model, although the changes in language and education in Africa seem more parallel to those in Europe. Cooper rejects the description of all these transformations as ‘globalization’, but perhaps if his hosts had asked for a fourth lecture readers might have been treated to an essay on cultural and social change as stimulating as his treatment of capitalism and imperial dynamics. In any event, if not a three-course meal, the author serves up a fine tasting menu.