It has been more than four decades since last a synthetic, specialist-friendly volume of South African history was released (Wilson and Thompson's Oxford History of South Africa 1969–1971). The four decades since then have seen the country's (or subcontinent's) history revised, revised and revised yet again, in concert and conversation with the region's ongoing transformation; it is thus past time for another weighty tome to enter the fray. Still, when I received this stark volume in the mail, with its black, serious cover, without a single picture (but, it must be said, some incredibly helpful and detailed maps) I found myself asking: why? What purpose do such compendiums serve, beyond sitting on shelves like micro-encyclopedias, useful for preparing lectures, but too dry for casual or assigned reading?

Hamilton, Mbenga and Ross have answered my questions. There are many missteps, but overall The Cambridge History of South Africa, Volume 1 is a useful, occasionally readable and welcome state of the field of precolonial South African history. By mustering chapters written by about a dozen of the country's most prominent historians, Hamilton, Mbenga, and Ross present a comprehensive analysis of the movements of people and working of power from the advent of food production in the first millennium of the common era, until the eve of the subcontinent's industrial revolution. Non-specialist – but still professional – historians will benefit from the volume's comprehensive and expansive chapters (the volume is far too detailed and jargony to hold the interest of lay readers); South Africanists and Africanists will find primers on the various historiographic and interpretative debates that have enlivened studies of the precolonial past; and specialists of the twentieth century will be reminded of the sheer immensity of the preindustrial period and will be awed by the inventive use of sources and general creativity of those without our archive. Indeed, perhaps the volume's greatest success is the case it makes for renewed attention to the region's pre-twentieth century past, a call which some have heeded in the past decade.

After a brief introduction that makes the case for another volume like this, the book's editors offer an extensive overview of how and why historians and other interested parties have interpreted the centuries leading up to the discovery of diamonds and gold. Early guild members like George Theal are here, but so are activists like Sol Plaatje, whose Mhudi Tim Couzens described as the first inclusive ‘South African national epic’. Plaatje's example is an apt one; from the early Afrikaner nationalists to Bantustan intellectuals, the editors successfully demonstrate the range of uses to which the past has been put across the various epochs, and media, of South African history.

The chapters that follow chart a chronological path through these long centuries, tackling, in turn, the dynamics of hunter gatherer, pastoralist, and agriculturalist communities from the Cape to the Limpopo (John Parkington and Simon Hall) and the trajectory of trade, food production, and political power among Bantu-speaking people across the entire summer-rainfall/eastern half of the region. The latter chapter, by Simon Hall, is particularly compelling; he synthesizes a vast amount of material to explore the common historical experiences of communities from the Zimbabwe plateau, to the Nguni heartland along the shores of the Indian Ocean. These chapters are a ‘greatest hits compilation’ of the subcontinent's precolonial history; archaeological materials are here; climactic and linguistic data make a cameo; rock paintings, oral traditions and ethnographic insights enliven the otherwise silent remnants of this barely documented time. In this regard, Hall's discussion of Zimbabwe culture stands for an especially skilled synthesis of these various historical methods.

These chapters are quite detailed and perhaps a little dry, but they do important work by showcasing what digging has been done. They thus can be profitably read with the volume's last chapter ‘Transformations in Consciousness’, by Paul Landau (whose recently published study of the longue durée of Bantu-speakers' political theory and practice promises to reopen a host of questions about the period under study here). Like Hall's and Parkington's chapters, Landau's ranges widely across the centuries and the country's climactic and cultural zones; unlike them, he proposes an entirely new way to think about the changes in political power over the millennia, as intellectual history. In particular, Landau employs Sotho-Tswana and Nguni vocabularies to demonstrate how Africans thought about themselves and their communities, and especially about the working of political power in ways unimagined (or willfully ignored?) by missionaries, ethnographers and the bureaucracies that followed their cues. The chapter raises more questions than it answers; it is more allusive than explicative, but it is dynamic and creative and in the best traditions of a postmodern, postcolonial historiography that refuses to take polities, identities and epistemologies as givens and instead probes their construction and manipulation in time.

Landau's successes, like those of the first two chapters, cast the shortcomings of the chapters in between into sharper relief. In their introduction the editors argue that their post-Oxford History vision is clearer about the fluidity of identities and mixing of peoples, ideas and things that marked the time before industrialization. Yet in the chapters on the early Cape Colony (Ross); relationships between Griqua, Sotho-Tswana and Xhosa on the frontiers (Wright); transformations in the Cape economy (Legassick and Ross); and conquest of the South African interior (Etherington, Harries and Mbenga), the editors' understandable desire for complexity too frequently devolves into repetitive detail, a thicket of names, places and events that obscures the bigger theoretical or analytical question at hand. Wright's chapter is the exception to this; the story of the mfecane is truly in the details. But overall, these chapters needed a bit more pruning and shaping, especially between the Legassick and Ross chapter and the Etherington, Harries and Mbenga chapter, which repeat each other at times, and whose argument – that the British were not the saviors imperial propaganda and historiography alleged them to be – is not exactly novel. That said, those in search of a compendium of battles, personages, dispossessions, amalgamations and migrations, need look no further.

That critique, however, does not diminish the work the editors have done. It is both a credit and a boon to the study South African history to have this all in one place. And, as the editors argue in their introduction, it would be a pity if more historians did not follow their lead. The authors collected here draw on literature that is young by the standards of Thompson and Wilson (not to mention Theal and Plaatje), but not by the standards of professional history. For example, the footnotes suggest that study of the nineteenth century, preindustrial Transvaal more or less stopped with Peter Delius, save a few nudges forward in the late 1980s and mid-1990s. Only a handful of the hundreds of footnotes in this volume come from the 2000s. The greatest credit to the editors of, and contributors to, this volume would be for a new generation to survey the field collected between its plain covers, cast it aside, and get to work. A past this vital deserves Oxbridge's attention more frequently than every forty years.