Hunting Africa explores the history of British big game hunting in Africa between the 1870s and 1914, tracing its origins as a commercial enterprise and its transformation into an upper-class sporting holiday. Angela Thompsell's analysis of hunters’ diaries and letters, importation records, contemporary newspapers, and sporting journals situates changes in big game hunting in complicated discourses of gender, imperialism, and landscape. Thompsell teaches us that the ‘intrepid’ men so firmly associated with big game hunting did not create or sustain its symbolic power alone: British readers, Africans, and British huntresses were also important players in this story.

It bears stating at the outset that the volume is published in the British Scholar Society's ‘Britain and the World’ series. Thompsell is clearly writing for an audience interested in the history of the British men and women who traveled to Africa as part of the British imperial project, even as she incorporates Africans’ experiences into the narrative. The imperial perspective framing the book is both an advantage and a disadvantage for the arguments she wants to make. By focusing on British hunters traveling in eastern, southern, and central Africa, Thompsell is able to accumulate enough evidence to track the development of novel forms of hunting by women and their impact on ideas about the civilizing power of the imperial project in British territories imagined to be ‘extra-colonial’ (6). With a narrower focus on a particular expedition, career, or region of the continent, she may not have had enough evidence to make this fascinating argument.

Yet, the broad geographical scale also means that Thompsell's arguments about the role of Africans in big game hunting are quite generalized because they are largely divorced from the specifics of local African hunting histories and cultures. Thompsell introduces African leaders controlling white hunters’ movements, African porters revolting against British employers, and guides adopting new technologies. These important examples of African agency reveal interesting details about porterage and early colonial labor laws. But we learn few specifics of the ‘African knowledge’ invoked in the title: what hunting looked like in particular times and places before big game hunting and, therefore, the local or regional impacts on African societies as African hunting practices changed with the advent of new kinds of hunting expeditions. This is not a missed opportunity; we can easily look, as Thompsell does, to others’ work on interactions between European and specific African hunting traditions.Footnote ¹ But there may be other kinds of questions (and sources) that better fit the scale of Thompsell's story. For example, how did widespread ideas in eastern and central Africa about hunting grounds as ‘places apart’ articulate with British hunters’ and readers’ imagining of big game hunting grounds as ‘extra-colonial’ spaces? And, with what feedback on the kinds of ethnographies, such as Victor Turner's work, that Thompsell employs as sources of expertise about traditional African hunting (90)?

The scope of the project also affords Thompsell the opportunity to tie the story of big game hunting to other contemporaneous forms of imperial knowledge making. Thompsell uses hunters’ discoveries of physical features and new species to illustrate their engagement with the fields of geography and biology and to argue that hunting was an important site for the production of imperial knowledge. But this reader also wondered whether or how the knowledge hunters ‘discovered’ was different from other forms of knowledge-making involving expeditions and close collaborations between Europeans and Africans in fields like anthropology, ornithology, linguistics, and so on, all of which were implicated in the kinds of civilizational discourses and ‘scientific’ knowing with which Thompsell credits big game hunters. Indeed, Thompsell's arguments about the relationship between big game hunting, gender, health, imperial might, sportsmanship, and civilized comportment resonate in interesting ways with contemporaneous ideas about the role of hunting in the origins and evolution of mankind. In the period of Thompsell's study, hunting was hotly debated: was hunting the great adaptation that separated humans from apes or an instantiation of man's most depraved, animalistic instincts? Many of these ideas can be traced back to the Scottish Enlightenment and were revived in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by British philosophers and scientists.

In sum, Hunting Africa buttresses many current arguments in Africanist scholarship about imperial knowledge and the agency of African collaborators. It shines, however, in bringing to the fore fascinating arguments about the relationship between hunting, gender, nature, and the limits and successes of imperial power in the British imagination.