This volume addresses questions about the relationship of academic anthropology and colonial rule that have been in circulation since the end of the colonial era.Footnote ¹ But it is distinguished by its broad coverage, including essays treating Belgian, British, French, German and Italian colonial situations. Indeed, it stretches the definition of its purview to include a paper by Patrick Harries that analyses Swiss anthropologists, whose country was not a colonial power, who saw parallels between Alpine peoples and African ones – a form of projection (analogizing the lower orders in metropolitan society and subject peoples) that, as Harries observes, was also prevalent in colonizing countries. And Tilley suggests that its contributions will serve to help ‘scholars to avoid misleading binaries – black/white, colonized/colonizer, African/Western and tradition/modernity being the most obvious’ (p. 13).

Considerations of allocated space prevent me from treating all of the aspects of this collection that will interest readers of this review, and so I give only some examples of the book's compelling material. Holger Stoecker shows that, in interwar Germany, Africanists were able to make successful academic careers by adopting a research program suited to anticipatory colonialism (or at least making claims to do so in their grant proposals), doing work justified as likely to be useful if the state won the Second World War and regained colonies it lost after the First World War. Jean-Hervé Jezequel describes ethnographies produced in Francophone Africa by Africans, many (if not all) of them schoolmasters, whose analyses could be ‘used to pursue fairly localized and personal family objectives’ (p. 165), such as claims to inherited rights to traditional offices that colonial rulers found plausible. Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale explain why studying anthropology with Bronislaw Malinowski at the London School of Economics served the political purposes of Jomo Kenyatta, a hero of Kenya's liberation struggle and the country's first president, whose postgraduate diploma thesis was published as Facing Mount Kenya (1938), a book that was not a success as such (it sold few copies and was not well reviewed); Malinowski's functionalist anthropology was an instrument that Kenyatta used to reveal, ‘with scientific authority, the logic of Kikuyu civilization, and its right, therefore, to a modernity it could call its own’ (pp. 184ff.). Nancy Rose Hunt identifies colonial societies' ‘eugenic and labor anxieties about “dying races” and infertility’ (p. 270) as origin points of the specialty of medical anthropology, paying particular attention to a Belgian planter who undertook research and practical action in the Belgian Congo after the Second World War and a French physician with anthropological training whose first employment in Africa was with a diamond mining company in Gabon in 1953, both of them working within what equatorial African colonial rulers understood to be the ‘Central African infertility belt’; though their circumstances were very different, both of them were notable for their attention to biomedical factors, resisting the long-dominant interpretation of infertility as some function of psychological and social pathology, which had considerable appeal for officials and had been sanctioned by earlier social scientists. And Douglas H. Johnson summarizes the considerable literature on the relationship between anthropology and colonial rule in the Sudan (to which he has previously contributed).

A greater degree of editorial intervention might have been exercised in the production of this collection. The essays ought not to presume knowledge readers may not have. For example, Stoecker describes the development of the system of scientific peer review by the German Notgemeinschaft der deutschen Wissenschaften (Emergency Society for German Science), founded in 1920 (renamed the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft during the Third Reich, when it also came under political control), but readers unfamiliar with this episode in the history of science may not fully appreciate his narrative. And readers ought to be reminded of the perennial conflict between proponents of assimilation and those of association – a recurrent theme in French colonial history that figures in Emmanuelle Sibeud's chapter in the collection (its first) – in Gary Wilder's discussion of French regimes' criteria for granting Africans full citizenship (in the collection's last chapter). Furthermore, the editors ought to have translated into Standard English the occasional stylistic infelicities of their non-Anglophone contributors. For example, Benoît de L'Estoile quotes Henri Labouret, a colonial official turned academic who became a director of the International African Institute for African Languages and Cultures (IAILC), and who in 1927 exhorted the IAILC's Executive Council to undertake compilation of a ‘complete repertory on people that may be useful to our work’ (p. 101); decoding this statement depends on the text following L'Estoile's quotation, which explains that Labouret wanted to create a network of knowledgeable correspondents in Africa, indigenes as well as Europeans, who would provide information useful to European colonial rulers intent on developing enlightened administrative policies. With more rigorous editing, this collection might have been made more accessible. Nevertheless, it represents a valuable scholarly contribution.