Julia Tischler's monograph focuses on the Kariba Dam, an often overlooked subject that is critical for understanding a variety of themes related to development in sub-Saharan Africa at the dusk of the colonial period. In the narrative's five chapters, with accompanying introductory and concluding sections, Tischler maps the phases of the dam's construction and its aftermath in ‘roughly chronological order’ (p. 16) on what is now the Zambia/Zimbabwe border. In this setting she depicts the difficulties in producing what was the world's fourth largest power scheme, built in the middle of the African continent.

Tischler's aims are higher than merely describing the behemoth that was Kariba, and she avoids the path of her academic predecessors by including, but not focusing entirely, on the resettlement of the Gwembe Tonga people. She attempts to look at a variety of actors entangled within the Kariba process and interrogate their positions in the scheme. In her work, Tischler tries to decipher not only whose voices mattered the most, but also the different scales of interaction and separation between groups which would come to symbolise the completed project.

The author's preferred angle of analysis, one of ‘entanglement’, is a lens which attempts to break up dichotomies and reveals ‘both ‘shared’ and ‘divided’ histories’ (p. 9). From this framework, one can look at Kariba as not only a colonial, but also as an international and a local struggle. Her book seeks to explore ‘the links between modernization and late-colonial nation-building’ (p. 3).

Tischler attributes a tremendous amount of significance to the often-forgotten Kariba Dam. From her point of view, the dam cannot be relegated to one symbolic purpose alone. In the course of her work, she reveals its ability to act as a microcosm for key components of modernity, the post-war decline of indirect rule, a mini-industrial revolution, globalisation, and, perhaps most surprisingly, Italian labour history in the 1950s. While Tischler approaches these somewhat radical statements with an impressive arsenal of sources, the ability to both criticise and synthesise secondary materials, and refreshing frameworks, she ventures toward her goals equipped with a tendency to exclude some of the most illuminating sources.

To complete her monograph, Tischler travelled to the UK, Zambia and Malawi to visit each country's respective national archives. However, while she explains the significance of Impresit, the Italian company responsible for both the dam's planning and a significant supply of its workforce, she did not, as far as the reviewer is aware, travel to Italy to conduct research. It would have been helpful if the author would have at least articulated the reason for this exclusion in her introduction.

Tischler's attempt at explaining the history of the Central African Federation serves as yet another example of her odd source selection. When explaining the theory of partnership, a central tenet of the Federation, she writes that this implied a commitment of some ‘degree of racial cooperation’ rather than ‘future equality between the races’ (p. 56). However, if the reader flips to the note section, he or she will find the infamous definition provided by Prime Minister Godfrey Huggins of Southern Rhodesia where he equated partnership ‘to the relationship between rider and horse’ (p. 251).

The exclusion of an explicit discussion of this quote from Tischler's work is problematic for a number of reasons. Primarily, if the reader is unfamiliar with the history of the Central African Federation, the way that Tischler explains partnership sounds less sinister than the definition implied by those who wielded power. On the other hand, if the reader is well-versed on the history of colonialism in central Africa, he or she will be familiar with this quote, and would most likely appreciate it being put into conversation with Tischler's theoretical understanding of partnership, and how this related to the Kariba Dam scheme.

Ultimately, this was a book that needed to be written. It ties together many critical themes of modernisation around a concrete example of a project meant to propel the African continent into the future. It has its flaws which may make the reader wary of the author's extensive hypotheses, but it exists as an important addition to the historiography of development in sub-Saharan Africa.