The European conquest of African lands and people at the end of the nineteenth century stands as one of the most blatant and egregious instances of violence, greed and racism in human history. It brought forth an era of European colonial domination and exploitation that ravaged the economic potential of the African continent and subjected millions of African women, children and men to countless humiliations, including forced labour, involuntary military conscription and daily racial insults. Why did Europe colonize Africa, in what has become commonly known as the ‘scramble’ for Africa, and usher in this era of widespread abuse and exploitation? According to historian Richard Reid, the answer to that question lies in the histories of Africans themselves to a far greater degree than previously recognized.

In The African Revolution, Reid invites readers to reconceptualize the ‘scramble’ as the culmination of multiple processes working in parallel and intersecting with one another, rather than focus on the machinations of the Berlin Conference. The first four chapters examine political, economic and social changes taking place in Africa during the nineteenth century in order to reveal patterns of instability, violence and inequality that, Reid argues, characterized Africa in the decades prior to the 1880s and contributed to the colonization of the continent by European powers. Chapters 5 and 6 draw attention to Africans who traded with or worked for European commercial or military entities, pointing to their role in shaping the relationship between Africa and Europe over this long period prior to formal colonization. The final chapter offers reflections on historical memory that do not relate directly to the book’s overall argument.

Reid makes a compelling case for a renewed focus on the nineteenth century in African history. He rightly notes that the term ‘precolonial’ suggests an inaccurate distinction between a supposedly pre-modern age prior to European conquest and a modern colonial period. This entrenched way of periodizing the African past ignores the substantial modernization of many African societies during the earlier part of the nineteenth century and detracts from the transformational changes in political, economic and social life across the continent in the decades just prior to colonial rule. As Reid notes, current and recent generations of historians have overwhelmingly focused on the colonial and so-called postcolonial eras, leaving the historiography of Africa in the nineteenth century and earlier somewhat stagnant since the 1970s.

The African Revolution is loaded with examples of dynamic change in African societies from all corners of the continent. Each section of the book draws a connection to one major ivory- and slave-trading route running from the East African interior to the Indian Ocean, but the chapters themselves provide details from a wide-ranging assortment of African people and places. Painting with such a broad brush necessarily means that some historical examples are mentioned only briefly, but the effort to include every major region of Africa is admirable.

What is disappointing and even misleading about the book is the way in which all of the dynamic changes of nineteenth-century Africa point towards what Reid sees as the inevitable finale of European conquest. As explained in the section titled ‘Inescapable partition’, Reid’s argument in this book is that Africans laid the groundwork for and essentially caused the European takeover. Each instance of African innovation and creativity is undermined in Reid’s narrative by the fact that the African actors ultimately created instability, violence and inequality as they pursued their ambitions and global connections. Within this narrative, even a pioneer of African nation building and modernization such as Africanus Horton is portrayed as helping to cause the European takeover. The Africans in this book are presented as agents of change and dynamic innovators, to be sure. But there is a recurring claim that their efforts were always tainted by an unexplained failure to see that they were sowing the seeds of their own destruction.

Reid anticipates that some readers might view The African Revolution as some sort of apology for European colonization of Africa, or as somehow blaming the Africans themselves for it. He encourages readers to let go of the ‘old-fashioned’ notion of conquest and to instead recognize the partition of Africa by Europeans as ‘part of an ongoing exercise in political, economic, social and cultural reformation across the continent’ (p. 24). Africa was already being partitioned by Africans long before Europeans intervened, he argues. The problem with this argument, and with Reid’s attempt to make Africans and Europeans partners in a shared process of colonization, is that the European nations involved in this process deliberately planned and executed an armed conquest and occupation of distant and foreign lands and people. It was not Africa that colonized Europe, after all.