In recent times, there has been growing international interest in Africa, so much so that there is now talk of a “New Scramble for Africa.” Africa has now emerged as a hugely important source of oil in the global economy, as well as an increasingly important region in international relations. This is due largely to new discoveries and the instability of oil markets in the Middle East, which compels the search for alternative supply locations.

These and other factors have resulted in an upsurge of interest by a variety of countries focusing their attention toward sub-Saharan Africa. The two books under review are thus extremely timely and contemporary. It might be argued that there is nothing particularly new about the new “Scramble.” There are no well-defined spheres of interest or control today, and obviously territory is not being divided up. Yet an identifiable configuration is clearly emerging. American oil corporations largely control the oil fields of those economies that have recently discovered oil reserves, such as Equatorial Guinea and São Tomé and Príncipe, while British and American oil interests dominate Nigeria and French companies lead in Gabon and Congo-Brazzaville. Chinese corporations dominate the oil sector in Sudan. Meanwhile, actors from Brazil, India, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, and so on are aggressively competing and seeking access across the continent. It is not a replay of the nineteenth century, but Africa's resources are being increasingly exploited by competing international actors. Of course, this is all with the active complicity of African actors.

With a new energy policy in the United States bent on diversifying Washington's sources of oil, and with the increased activities of new actors such as Chinese and Indian oil corporations in Africa, alongside the “traditional” exploiters of Africa's oil (the British, French, etc.), a perceived rush for Africa is now a feature of the continent's international relations. Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly the Gulf of Guinea and the Horn of Africa, have acquired major geostrategic importance. Africa has now emerged as a major site for competition between various states and their corporations. Within the next few years, perhaps the largest investment in the continent's history will be seen, as billions of dollars are poured into Africa. All this is of extreme interest to any student of international relations.

Focusing specifically on China, within the academic realm there has been an equally exponential rise in the literature on China's ties with Africa. From a backwater of academia, with one or two people working on the subject, carefully basing their work on field research, the subject has now attracted a plethora of experts. One cannot open a journal or visit a bookstore these days without being confronted with the latest article or volume on these “new” phenomena. As with many things, more is sometimes less. A pattern has developed whereby academics with no known prior interest or knowledge vis-à-vis Sino-African ties (or China in general, for that matter) grandly announce that all previous work on the subject is deficient and worthless. They then proceed, citing and utilizing this very same work, with the addition of material mined from the Internet (including, in some cases, Wikipedia), to put forward their novel interpretations. Doing such time-consuming things as fieldwork or even familiarizing oneself with the basics relating to both China's and Africa's political economies is apparently deemed not necessary these days. Happily, Deborah Brautigam's The Dragon's Gift cannot be counted among such volumes. Indeed, I believe that this is the best book so far on the developmental implications of China's engagement with Africa.

Brautigam has done an excellent job in bringing together existing work on the topic and also first-class field research. As a result, the volume offers a more nuanced understanding of Beijing's policies than many other previous books on the subject. Due to her long engagement with the subject (Brautigam is a true pioneer on Sino-African ties and was ploughing the field long before it became fashionable), she avoids the mistake, common in much other work, of treating “China” as a monolithic actor. As the book shows, China's foreign-economic policies are put into practice by an increasingly diverse set of actors under pressure from a wide variety of interest groups and constituency demands.

Central government ministries as well as provincial and municipal bureaucracies all have input, while state-owned enterprises (SOEs) now have to be sensitive both to general government policies and proclamations and to the profit motive. Although the central government may have a broad Africa policy, it has to be mediated via the economic interests of private corporations and the political motivations and aspirations of local state officials who, with growing autonomy, may not share the enunciated central vision. What has been termed “fragmented authoritarianism,” where policy made at the center becomes ever more malleable to the organizational and political goals of the different parochial and regional agencies entrusted with enforcing policy, is a reality in contemporary China. Throw into this mix the facts that commercial organizations in China are ever more centered on profitability and that the numbers and types of actors within the fragmented-authoritarianism framework have increased dramatically, and the decreasing willingness of many Chinese actors to perform activities willy-nilly at the behest of Beijing becomes clear.

This understanding then allows Brautigam to explore how policy is made and implemented. Demonstrating that new and still-changing combinations of forces continue to remake Chinese foreign policy, a development intimately linked to the reform era, indeed allows the reader a good insight into the real story behind the dramatic headlines. Competition and compromise with respect to policy formulation is now the norm at all levels of government as the policy process has become more open, facilitating greater, more proactive input from various agencies, rather than the former reactive version. Although the role of the paramount leader continues to be significant, in general, policy direction is increasingly open to advice from academics and business associations, and China's policies toward Africa are becoming more nuanced as a result.

A weak link, however, is also in evidence, one that concerns the implementation of policy. It is here that the Chinese state reveals itself as a bargainer and negotiator. At the same time, some of the pathologies associated with the post-Maoist liberalization regime, such as an inattention to environmental safeguards and workers' rights, are being replicated abroad as Chinese corporations increasingly operate outside of China, notably in Africa. These create serious problems for Beijing policymakers intent on maintaining Chinese “face” abroad.

Even with regard to ostensibly strategic arms of government, policy coherence has its limitations. For instance, Beijing has been incapable of enforcing a geographical division of labor on the main national oil companies, namely, the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation (Sinopec), and the China National Offshore Oil Company (CNOOC). The result is overlap and competition among China's national oil companies, even though they are all ostensibly central to Beijing's energy-security policies. All three corporations possess subsidiary companies and have independent seats on their executive boards, meaning that various agendas are often pursued. There is arguably little in the way of a unified strategy to secure an entrée into specific oil and gas fields; in some instances, national oil companies have even bid against one another—as when CNPC and Sinopec vied against each other for a pipeline project in Sudan. These are all realities of modern China, and it is necessary for analysts to recognize these complexities. Anyone interested in Sino-African ties needs to read this book.

Pádraig Carmody's book is equally vital. For a continent often seen as being marked by grinding poverty and declining standards of living, the question analysts need to ask are the following: Will this upsurge in income represent real potential for progressive change for Africans? Will the new “Scramble for Africa” result in positive development? And will Africa's international relations be qualitatively reconfigured by the continent's new status as a major supplier of energy to the global political economy? Carmody attempts to situate and then answer such important issues.

One characteristic of the Scramble is that while it is not solely a race between Chinese and American corporations, the Scramble's dynamics are heavily influenced by the roles and activities of actors from these two states. Policymakers in both nations have identified African oil as vital to their respective nations' national interest, albeit for different motives. It is apparent that policy analysts in Beijing see the broader global political milieu as being intrinsically linked to Chinese energy security and feel that in the current environment, China is vulnerable until and unless it can diversify its oil sourcing and secure greater access to the world's oil supplies. Chinese oil corporations have entered into the competition for African oil. In fact, China's economic and diplomatic strategy has for the most part focused on oil-rich states generally lacking American investment in the energy sector.

From the American perspective, the war on terror and preparations for Iraq enormously increased the strategic value of West African oil reserves. The high level of interest from such major importers has certainly raised the level of competition over Africa's oil. While corporations headquartered in other states—Britain, Brazil, France, India, and Malaysia, for example—are playing important roles in the ongoing Scramble and equally striving to build up their oil portfolios in Africa, as Carmody demonstrates, it is the ostensible Sino-American competition for oil on the continent that has grabbed the most headlines.

As Carmody equally shows, however, unlike the colonial Scramble for Africa, African agency is far more present in the contemporary rush for oil. Many African governments are quite proactive in their roles within today's context. Although we might aver that the nineteenth-century Scramble was driven and dictated by European colonial interests, in the current Scramble, African leaders act in the role of decision makers. While it is true that many African states are rich in oil, they often lack sufficient capital and/or capacity to exploit these resources. Such a situation fosters formative conditions whereby African elites might be seen as being wholly dependent upon external actors to facilitate exploitation. This may be so in some countries, but the ability of most African governments to skillfully negotiate favorable contracts is a reality that should not be discounted when comparing the old Scramble with the new.

As Carmody discusses, many African governments are quite adroit in playing the game—albeit for the benefit of the incumbent elites, rather than the broad masses. In Angola, for example, the state-owned oil company, Sonangol, is an entity that can articulate elite interests in the oil sector with comparative prowess, bringing together its scarce human resources and enabling success in negotiations. Sonangol is a unique marriage of expertise and market savvy with the narrow self-enrichment goals of a failed-state leadership. However unpalatable in such circumstances, African agency should not be ignored in any discussion of the new Scramble, and Carmody does a good job in relating how African elites play the game.

Both books under review show that external actors are engaging in the continent in an unprecedented manner. The key question that future researchers need to look at, building on Brautigam's and Carmody's work, is whether the globalized division of labor, which since the days of the old Scramble has defined Africa's place in the world economy, will be substantially changed by the presence of new actors such as China, or whether we will see a continuation and reification of existing trajectories.