Sierra Leone's diamonds have been the subject of a great deal of study since the first gems were brought to market in the 1930s. The violence that swept the country throughout the 1990s only made these valuable stones a more popular topic for scholars, journalists, activists, novelists, filmmakers, even musicians.

Despite all the attention paid to Sierra Leone's diamonds, this is a good time for a comprehensive overview of the political, economic and social details of the industry. The Kimberley Process (the tracking and certification protocols meant to authenticate a diamond's country of origin and transit along the diamond chain) has now been in place for a few years; the war in Sierra Leone has been over for a decade; and much of the attention paid to African resource wars has shifted to oil and to mining in the DR Congo. The story of Sierra Leone's diamonds is due for both updating and historical contextualisation.

Diane Frost's From the Pit to the Market does both. Drawing on the existing literature on Sierra Leone's diamonds, on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in Sierra Leone, Frost divides her monograph into two parts. The first deals with the particulars of Sierra Leone and its now eight-decade relationship with mining. There is a strong case to be made that the colonial origins of the diamond economy in Sierra Leone have simply become neo-colonial relations since independence. Frost makes that case persuasively, outlining how foreign nationals, governments and corporations collaborate with a small cadre of Sierra Leonean elites to reap tremendous profits from a resource that is very difficult to regulate and easy to exploit. None of this will be surprising to most readers, but Frost does important work by laying out the complex details.

The second part of the book places Sierra Leone's relationship with diamonds into wider context. Here she explores the mechanics of the global flow of gems, and examines in particular the overlapping networks of legitimate and criminal trade that have together ‘disarticulated’ (in Manuel Castell's term) much of Africa from the global economy. The author's knowledge of both the relevant political economy literature and the details of a bewildering transnational trade are impressive, and she serves as a clear and informative guide to both macro-level processes like the Kimberley Process and the fine-grained analysis of individual players like Charles Taylor (the former President of Liberia) and Victor Bout (the Tajik arms dealer).

From the Pit to the Market breaks little new theoretical ground. Frost relies for her analytic framework on Castells and writers such as Paul Collier to argue that diamonds made greedy excess and chronic underdevelopment possible, and that this in turn made war more likely and more sustained when it occurred. But Frost's attention to detail gives this sometimes reductive argument ballast, and the book will be a valuable contribution to the literature on the most mystifying of global markets. Although repetitive at points it is clearly written and suitable for both undergraduate and graduate student audiences. Its admirable mix of methods makes From the Pit to the Market an excellent example of interdisciplinary social science research in Africa that should have appeal to readers in history, political science, anthropology and sociology. One can only hope that it might also find a readership among policy and corporate players in the diamond trade whose role to date Frost so convincingly suggests has been devastating for ordinary Sierra Leoneans.