This is an ambitious book. Its key aims, as outlined in the introduction, are to provide a review of African history over the longue durée, emphasising diverse types of evidence and an interdisciplinary approach, and to draw on the lessons of this history to inform current debates about political, economic and environmental change on the continent and beyond. The book's origins are in the teaching of an introductory survey course on African history; this background is reflected in an approachable writing style and helpful annotated bibliographies after each chapter. Each chapter also shares a similar structure, with the geographic focus and the sources used outlined at the beginning. In its approach, it joins great works in African history which have long been of great value in teaching, particularly John Iliffe's Africans: The History of a Continent, which shares with this book an emphasis on the interactions between Africans and their environment. These are broad shoulders on which to stand. What this book does well, and will hopefully encourage others to do, is to emphasise the importance of work in a variety of fields, especially archaeology and historical linguistics, for the student of African history.

The book begins, literally, with the African origins of humanity and the first part of the book examines debates amongst scholars from a variety of disciplines about the early emergence of hominin species, and their social and economic organisation. The section seeks to highlight the innovative ways in which African communities across this very long stretch of history (from the first hominins until the present day) have responded to environmental challenges. The second part of the book, which emphasises potential cross-fertilisations between history and anthropology, examines the diversity of ways in which African societies were organised, stressing in particular the importance of matriliny and heterarchy in a number of African cultures. It also examines the construction of African economies, tackling the particularly thorny issue of slavery and the slave trade. The third and final section turns its attention to more recent events, focusing on colonial and post-colonial development efforts and the neglect of African contributions in the face of a dominant Western narrative. In all of these areas, the chapters aim to show that ‘the ingenuity, adaptability and resilience that Africans have shown with respect to both their environment and more recent political and economic challenges can serve as essential lessons for us no matter where we live’ (p. 223).

The book's two very admirable ambitions are, unfortunately, not always in sync with one another. One difficulty is that, while the bibliography covers a wide range of disciplinary approaches, it is relatively thin, and each chapter references only a few published works. The conclusions of these are frequently merely summarised, obscuring important debates. This feature, combined with the effort to provide lessons for the contemporary world, lends to the historical evidence the appearance of certainty which would be surprising to most historians of Africa. This tends sometimes to cut against one of the book's key aims, to show the innovative and dynamic nature of African societies. Perhaps the most egregious example of this is in Chapter 7 on African economic systems in which there are strong echoes of the substantivist arguments made in the 1960s by Karl Polanyi, Paul Bohannon and others (though these works are not cited) which also claimed that the market economy was a foreign imposition. As the author is no doubt aware, these claims have come under sustained attack since then by Tony Hopkins and Robin Law, to name just two. Through their efforts a significant body of research has accumulated showing that pre-colonial economies did in fact behave as predicted by later economic theories. A student reading this book would be unaware of these contributions. Uncritical discussions of studies discussed in newspaper articles (pp. 170–1) without tracing original source do not increase the reader's confidence in the conclusions drawn.

Limited reading of the literature in some areas also frequently leads to misunderstandings or mischaracterisations of evidence. Chapter 8 begins by noting what the author terms a contradiction between low levels of per capita income in Tanzania and the relatively rapid growth of the same. These are not at all contradictory: catch-up growth would be expected in poor economies, and these measure two different facets of economic performance. The third section of the book, in which this chapter appears, also unfortunately abandons the admirable longue durée focus of the other two parts. This most affects the penultimate chapter on the ‘African success story’ of Somaliland which might perhaps reach different conclusions if the longer-term stability of such arrangements was considered.

Finally, the book is let down by the standard of production and editing. Maps are largely reproduced from Wikipedia and a significant number of errors have crept in. Jared Diamond, currently Professor of Geography at UCLA would perhaps be unhappy to find himself being called a ‘journalist’ (p. 47); the limited control of African farmers over world prices was because they were relatively small-scale producers rather than because prices were ‘set by cartels based elsewhere’ (p. 166); and the ‘British Development Act’ of the 1940s (p. 164) presumably refers to the Colonial Development and Welfare Acts of 1940 and 1945.

This book shows the value of an interdisciplinary approach to African history, but would have perhaps been better served by focusing on the insights these fields can bring to historical debates, rather than trying to draw wider current lessons from a past that remains imperfectly understood.