No matter how it is done, writing history in the longue durée is a demanding task. In his survey of 5,000 years of North African history, from the early historical era to the contemporary period, Phillip C. Naylor approaches his subject with no small amount of Braudelian enthusiasm. Further distinguishing Naylor's book is the fact that it redoubles the task by putting together lands that are generally studied separately. Thus, while Fernand Braudel might have taken issue with this book's focus on events, he might have recognized a kindred spirit in its author's sweeping scope and range.

‘North Africa is understudied, and this must change’ (p. xiii); so Naylor begins his book, setting out its project to provide a concise survey of a region that is often neglected. This neglect is traceable in part to the fact that North Africa poses some important conceptual challenges. The northern parts of Africa fit awkwardly into an academic field that has divided itself into areas – Africa, Europe, and the Middle East – that are treated as more or less distinct from each other, if not self-contained. The western part of North Africa, known in Arabic as the Maghreb (al-maghrib), is an illustrative example of the problems of assuming that the world divides itself cleanly into homogenous and discrete units. With a historic population of multi-religious and multi-linguistic people who reflect the convergence of three continents, the Maghreb appears indistinct and liminal by the area-studies logic. Thus it has remained a lesser appendage of fields such as Middle East or African studies, which are more comfortable focusing on clearly discernable core territories. Naylor boldly upends these hierarchies by placing the Maghreb at the center of his work. The effect is the same as taking a map and turning it upside down. Egypt, part of North Africa but not the Maghreb, is decentered from the privileged position that it typically enjoys, and Naylor calls it a ‘hinge’, linking North Africa and West Asia. North Africa has several hinges. The Mediterranean Sea and the Sahara are two obvious examples that Naylor does not explore in detail, but the implications are clear enough: making determinacy the structuring principle of scholarship is a dangerous presumption.

While thought-provoking, these epistemological questions do not become the book's main subject. Instead Naylor finds unity and continuity across time and space through the idea of the transcultural, or ‘encounters and interactions within and among societies and civilizations’ (p. 1, emphasis original). The ‘cultural’ of this transcultural is broadly defined, including material culture and institutions. This gives the notion the necessary elasticity for Naylor to talk about different phenomena while preserving a coherent narrative. That narrative begins in the first two chapters with ancient Egypt, the Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans; it continues through four chapters documenting the arrival of Islam, the expansion of the Ottoman empire, and the period of European colonization; and the book finishes with three chapters explaining the struggles of decolonization and independence (including a detailed account of the western Sahara conflict).

There are times when the transcultural breaks down as a way to write about the historical dialectic. These appear in those moments in North Africa's past when historical actors themselves deployed transculturalism instrumentally in a bid for hegemony. Napoleon Bonaparte's claim that he led an army of ‘faithful Muslims’ into Egypt is a good example. While Naylor correctly observes that the ‘French imposed upon rather than interacted with Egyptians’ (p. 140), we do not get a good idea of how to mark the distinctions that separated this episode from something like Muslim rule in Spain. Readers can, of course, find their own answers in the material presented, but they will have to work through the problems of the transcultural idea used as a transhistorical category of analysis. Specifically, they will have to think critically about how transculturalism itself might be shaped by specific processes that vary in place and time and ask themselves whether this category itself is not in need of historicization and theorization.

This is a small criticism to make of a useful book. It has succeeded in its primary task of ‘locating’ North Africa's place in the curriculum, and I anticipate that it will become the primary textbook for coursework in this emerging field. The general reader will also be well served by turning to it first for an English-language survey. Although the specialist of the region might find analysis running thin in his or her particular domain, she or he, too, will appreciate it when sorting out the complexity of North Africa's long history, a history few have mastered as well in print as Naylor.

At the end of this survey, we see that sometimes the unfolding of time in this space reveals clear fault lines that justify the way in which the region has been allotted to different fields of study. At other times, however, we see striking continuity and coherence across areas, calling into question the way we now approach our work. Indeed, in peripheral lands such as North Africa, we recognize the site where notions of interiority and exteriority are themselves constituted. In this sense, the margins are not places that we can continue to marginalize.