John Thornton's remarkable new history of West-Central Africa represents the fruition of a lifetime's research into the precolonial history of the region, which began with the publication of his history of Kongo in 1983 (University of Wisconsin Press). With that first book, and the numerous publications that have followed, Thornton has produced an extraordinary range of work which attends both to the complexities of the history of West-Central Africa and to the importance of African histories to a wider Atlantic frame. This general history now offers readers something that is quite close to a definitive statement on the political history of the region that has absorbed Thornton's professional life.
Thornton's history is both narrative and analytical. It sweeps from the Bantu migrations and origins of agriculture and then state formation in the 12th and 13th centuries around Kongo and the Ovimbundu Highlands, through to the rise and fall of Kongo, its relationships with neighbouring powers, the role of the Portuguese slave trade and Angola, and then on to the emergence of the powerful empire of Lunda in the highlands spanning south-eastern Angola and western Zambia. Thornton manages both to capture the complexity and detail of the political frameworks of a wide array of polities, and also their insertion within a wider dynamic of historical change.
The density of the research and detail of the narrative make it impossible to do justice to the book in a review such as this, but it is worth singling out just some of its many unique qualities. The first is the admirable and unusually relentless focus on primary sources. Having spent a lifetime mining the relevant archives in Angola, Brazil and Europe, Thornton's narrative is driven by an extraordinary volume of archival sources, carefully pieced together to form a whole. The diligence with which both the research and its expression here in this narrative have been undertaken is truly extraordinary. Thornton has not only managed to collate an enormous amount of information from around the world, he has also cross-referenced and checked it in order to produce the most coherent and detailed history ever published of the peoples, polities and rulers who shaped life in this part of Africa for centuries.
A second important and original framework is Thornton's focus on the centrality of weaving industries in shaping the economic and political histories of West-Central Africa. For this reviewer, this is the most innovative historiographic contribution of the book. While other historians have attended to the importance of weaving and textiles to this region's history, Thornton is the first to give it the centrality that it merits. His research shows not only how political expansion of both Kongo and Lunda was driven by the economic (and perhaps cultural) imperative to control areas of the textile production belt, but also how the rise of European and Indian textile imports to Angola in the 18th century came when Portuguese traders were then marginalised from these cloth trade networks (257). Thornton places the textile trade within indigenous frameworks of display and consumption, and thus, rather than privileging the slave trade in his economic analysis he shows how differently power and the economy appeared to West-Central African subjects of history.
A third historiographic transformation which Thornton's history enables relates to gender history. Through the work of Mariana Candido on Benguela's female traders of the 19th century (James Currey, 2019; Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) and Linda Heywood's biography of Njinga of Matamba in the 17th century (Harvard University Press, 2017), there has been recent focus on gender in West-Central African history. Thornton's book shows how important women were to political power in a range of West-Central African states. He widens the frame beyond Njinga to discuss the role of female leaders in Nsoyo (a breakaway state that had been part of Kongo), the role of senior women in shaping Kongo's succession in the 17th century, and the enduring significance that this had – something perhaps anticipated by his earlier publications on the Antonine movement in Kongo in the early 18th century (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Thornton's book is thus revisionist in many ways. He does not minimise the global nexus which affected West-Central Africa in the early modern period, devoting for instance a whole chapter to the impact of the Thirty Years War on the region. His approach is rather to read global impacts through local idioms. Thus, while not downplaying the history of the slave trade, he does not accord it the centrality that previous historians have done. His focus is on the political history of the enormous range of polities that prospered at times between the 15th and 19th centuries in West-Central Africa, and on the way in which these political events shaped the experience of power in the region through gender, religion, warfare and consumption.
As with any such book, there are inevitably grounds for discussion over some parts of Thornton's interpretative frame. The impact of global currency trading on West-Central African currencies is given short shrift, and yet alternative explanations for inflation in the 17th century are not provided. And Thornton's focus on autochthonous idioms of power means that the collapse of the kingdom of Kongo is analysed through the lens of internal political and kinship registers – leaving aside a broader discussion of political fragmentation as a response to Atlantic trade which has been discussed by a variety of scholars, including (declaration of interest) myself.
None of this is to diminish Thornton's achievement. The purpose of a book such as this is precisely to provide an authoritative history with a new approach and framework. In this, Thornton has succeeded with style. It will be for future generations of historians to take up his analysis and data and discuss them, within the context of a book that will always be seen as a landmark.
