Mozambique provides a sharp contrast with transition in much of Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and even Asia. A Marxist movement (Frelimo) took power in 1975, pledging to construct a socialist state. Only 15 years later, a new constitution made no reference to socialism. By 1994, Mozambique was a multiparty democracy and one of the World Bank's “model” market reformers. Yet Frelimo remains in power, presiding over the private economy it once denounced. Why and how did this happen?

There has been no shortage of analysis of Mozambique's complex modern history, but this book stands out for its balance, its focus, and its careful scholarship. M. Anne Pitcher makes two central claims. First, she argues that Frelimo “owned” the transition process. This was not something forced on them by outside powers (the World Bank, for example), nor was Mozambique part of a falling series of dominoes linked to the Soviet Union. What she calls “transformative preservation” helps explain why there remained so much continuity between the socialist regime and the government hailed as a “model” reformer. Second, she argues that the authoritarian, state-directed transition was in fact shaped by continuous bargaining with a dense network of social actors.

In providing the evidence for her case, Pitcher begins her first chapter decades before independence, showing how the Portuguese created a surprisingly developmentalist state. Frelimo thus continued and deepened an already aggressive pattern of state intervention. The author's archival research allows her to paint a detailed portrait of the foreign and local businesses that grew powerful under the colonial state. Although Frelimo later nationalized much of the economy, many of these businesses—some “huge agricultural companies” (p. 63) among them—remained players in the shrunken private sector.

The second chapter covers the early years of Frelimo, making the case that the interventionist state was clearly motivated by socialist ideas, but also by African nationalism, and by a vision of modernity that was not far different from that held by the Portuguese before them. These two competing visions weakened the effort to impose socialism in Mozambique. Additionally, Pitcher argues that every transformative measure put in place by Frelimo met with robust contestation. The inability of the socialist state to transform the economy and the society opened it to bargains with the social actors it relied on for production. These bargains shaped the two periods of transition analyzed in the third chapter: the erosion of the state from below during the intensified civil war (1983 to 1990), and the transition to the market after 1990. Although she acknowledges the role of the war and external pressures, Pitcher shows how the transition was a carefully orchestrated effort by the Frelimo regime to preserve at least some of its authority and power. The outlines of this strategy parallel the gradual turn outward in China, at much the same time (and with no war) but with important differences. For example, in Mozambique, companies such as the British multinational Lonrho gained use rights to large tracts of land (the state retained formal ownership).

The fourth chapter focuses more narrowly on the construction of capitalism in postsocialist Mozambique, while the fifth and sixth chapters contain case studies of manufacturing and agriculture. Here, Pitcher briefly engages some standard Africanist debates in new ways, for example: Is a true domestic capitalist class rising in Mozambique, or simply a dependent “comprador” class? The author's detailed accounting of the new/old “cleavages and commonalities” transform these debates (p. 167). Gender, race, ethnicity, and region are sources of conflict in the new Mozambique and challenges to the formation of anything resembling a unified elite. These chapters also carefully document the overlap between state and business: joint ventures, minority shares and interlocking directorships. They trace the multiple roles taken by government officials, at once parliamentarians and heads of business associations; party members and bank directors. Do state–business relationships represent the kind of “embedded autonomy” Peter Evans praised in East Asia? No, Pitcher responds. These partnerships “compromise” autonomy and actually make it harder for the state to be flexible and innovative, or to demand performance (p. 178). The tight focus on business and the state provides considerable leverage, but this is a book about privatization, and one wonders: What happened to organized labor? Unions make brief appearances now and again, perhaps most notably in the sad case of the collapse of the cashew-processing industry, but they are for the most part simply absent from the story.

Pitcher follows in an honorable tradition of comparativists working in Africa. Transforming Mozambique reflects long periods of fieldwork, archival work, extensive interviews, and use of primary documents. There is very much to admire in its complex and rich portrayal of socialist transition. A fine book like this could do even more, however, to bring this case out of the shadows and into the mainstream of comparative theories. Because political scientists working outside of the Africa region rarely include African material and experience in the major debates of comparative politics, it is all the more important for those working on African cases to bring theories to the cases and bring the cases back to the theories. To be sure, Pitcher does use a framework adapted from Peter Evans's Embedded Autonomy (1995) in her analysis, but there is little engagement with the more specific literature on transitions. For example, the collapse of the cashew industry can also be analyzed as an almost inevitable result of the kind of partial liberalization described by Joel Hellman (“Winners Take All: The Politics of Partial Reform in Postcommunist Transitions,” World Politics 50 [1998]: 203–35). One also wishes that Pitcher had put into comparative perspective her conclusion that the Mozambican project “has a great possibility of collapsing at any time” (p. 146) and that the “troubled alliance between state and capital” is “endangering both political stability and economic development” (p. 178). These are important findings, but is this unique to Mozambique, or common elsewhere in socialist transitions? A comparative chapter at the conclusion of this work would have strengthened its claims and made it easier to integrate its many insights back into “the literature.” Still, even if those working on issues of transition have to make the comparisons themselves, they will find this excellent book more than ample reward for their efforts.