In this book, Edward Cavanagh reflects upon the position which the Griqua have held in the historiography of South Africa, at least as that historiography was constituted before 1994. In other words, this book is a long historiographical essay of the sort that would normally be seen as paving the way for new questions, approaches, or data. As such, it is well done; Cavanagh has taken account of just about all the literature on the Griqua, and has produced a fine summary of what various authors have written.

There are, of course, nuances with which it is possible to disagree. My own feeling is that Cavanagh has somewhat undervalued the work of P. J. van der Merwe, who, in a number of chapters of Die Noordwaartse Beweging van die Boere voor die Groot Trek, 1770–1842, provides the first genuine environmental history in South Africa – though perhaps the Philippolis Griqua do not figure in Van der Mere's account as much as they should. Cavanagh also, to my taste, overvalues J. S. Marias's account of the Griqua in Chapter 2 of The Cape Coloured People, 1652–1937, perhaps because it provides the first complete narrative of the Griqua captaincies. The problem is that in his brevity Marais skates too easily around the questions of identity and domination that are inherent in his work. Finally, Cavanagh, it seems to me, fails to appreciate the great importance of Martin Legassick's UCLA thesis of 1969 – a work no-one could accuse of brevity. This work, published in 2010 as The Politics of a South African Frontier: the Griqua, the Sotho-Tswana, and the Missionaries, 1780–1840, not only understands supremely well the processes at work in the creation of Griqua societies in the Transgariep, but also identifies and explains the Griquas' attempt to set themselves up as an aristocracy over the southern Batswana, as well as the reasons for the failure of this attempt.

The question is what follows from this historiographic overview. Cavanagh is fascinated by the fact that at a moment in the nineteenth century, roughly the 1830s and 1840s, the Griqua captaincies were the equal, at least, of any of the other powers in the Transgariep, but in contrast to the Basotho, Batswana, or Boer and British communities, the Griqua were unable to maintain their position. This is surely rather naive. The Griqua never had the numbers to compete effectively with any of the other groups. Once Sotho resistance to British overrule led to the creation of the Orange Free State, rather than the incorporation of the Orange River Settlement in the Cape Colony, the possibility of a maintained Griqua presence of any significance in central South Africa disappeared.

The other major question that seems to arise relates to the relationship between the captaincies of the nineteenth century and the membership of the Griqua churches in the twentieth. These, under the leadership of the Le Fleur family, made up the major part of those Griqua who became a force in the post-1994 Khoesan revival movement. The problem for Cavanagh is that most of the relevant work has been written since 1994, and is thus excluded from his discussion. Perhaps this explains why Cavanagh presents a few, somewhat platitudinous, ideas as to where scholarship should turn, in what is otherwise a very useful overview.