Jeremy Prestholdt's excellent study Domesticating the world adds new weight to the need for a comprehensive reassessment of the historical incorporation of African societies into industrial capitalism and the global economy after the early nineteenth century. Although regions of the continent were connected to different circuits of commodities, labour, and capital during this time period, in many parts of the continent, processes of globalization and commodification were often strikingly complex and far-reaching, and took place well before the advent of formal European colonial sovereignty. Moreover, these processes often occurred in circumstances where local African agency drove or shaped them to a much greater extent than was true in the twentieth century.

Prestholdt extends many of the insights of Jonathon Glassman's work on the East African caravan trade, both through creative, intelligent exploration of questions and concepts that have developed in the historiography of consumption and commodification, and through an intelligent and original linkage of the material world of nineteenth-century East Africa with the history of globalization.

The resulting work has a great deal to offer to a number of different audiences. For scholars interested in cross-cultural or comparative histories of consumerism, Prestholdt develops useful elaborations of established concepts such as emulation, which he recasts as similitude, in order to describe how East Africans performed ‘Englishness’ or cosmopolitanism, in order to shape imperial and global influence in their local context. While paying close attention to the economic history of the region, Prestholdt also thinks deeply about the performative and communicative character of commodities, and delivers an intricate and detailed analysis of the meaning of goods and of the transformation of social identity through material culture. This has all the strengths of an area-studies-based history, while remaining accessible and useful to comparativists and scholars of globalization. Indeed, Prestholdt successfully demonstrates exactly why scholars interested in globalization must consider its local hermeneutics from the ground up.

‘Modernity’ is a frustratingly protean term as it is used by scholars, and Prestholdt does not entirely overcome this problem. To some extent, he delivers what is becoming a conventional argument among Africanists, that Africans became ‘modern’ in simultaneity with the West, and that our ongoing contemporary misperceptions of that history are a consequence of late nineteenth-century imperial ideology. Like many scholars making similar arguments, he is so eager to describe nineteenth-century African cosmopolitans that groups that might have been less touched by global commodity flows, or that might have consciously rejected or contested some of their transformations, are less clearly visible. If ‘modernity’ in its consuming forms has an older, deeper, richer history in East Africa, which is much less a product of imperial hegemony than has been thought hitherto, then I suspect that the same is true of ‘tradition’ as a sociocultural artefact created and deployed by Africans themselves. Nevertheless, this is a creative, insightful, and original book, which deserves to be widely read and used in the ongoing reconsideration of the history of globalization.