Writing a review of the second edition of this landmark book is rather like trying to write a review essay on the entirety of the historiography of the economic history of Africa. This is not an overstatement. As Paul Lovejoy notes in his endorsement of this edition, the book's first edition ‘has stimulated research and shaped debate ever since’; nearly four decades later, Tony Hopkins's book remains a standard history of the subject. A pioneering work of historical foresight and insight, the clarity of the text and the significance of its themes make it routinely assigned to undergraduates. It will take many decades for it to be superseded in the canon of the historiography of Africa.

This second edition was long threatened by its author, but some feared that it would never see the light of day. So much historical water has flowed under the bridge since An Economic History of West Africa was first published in 1973 that revising each of the chapters would have required rewriting the entire book. Instead, Hopkins has written a lengthy introduction which places the writing of the book in the contexts of its time, and introduces both the book's broad themes and the ways in which his approaches have both shaped subsequent scholarship and been revised by it. While historians and economists have developed new data and new interpretations since 1973, Hopkins's new edition demonstrates how the pioneering studies of the first generation of historians of Africa in the West continue to shape the discussions and arguments of the field. This assertion seems to be broadly correct, and therefore emphasises how central it is for historians of the continent to be aware of these foundational literatures, and the ways in which they still frame historical questions and analysis.

One of Hopkins's core arguments is to show how significant this interrogation of founding perspectives can be. He argues that the low land–labour ratio on the African continent shaped many important institutions and economic relationships, far more than external inequalities of trade, as the dependency school had argued. In the introduction to the second edition, Hopkins notes that although some scholars have critiqued this hypothesis, much of the subsequent literature has taken its lead from this idea, and indeed confirmed it. Hopkins describes how his approach was shaped by Evsey Domar's reframing of the Niebohr hypothesis on slavery, and in recent years there have been some attempts to revive Domar's approach.Footnote ¹

Nevertheless, it is worth noting that the last few years have seen some new perspectives which may lead to further revisions of this approach. Assan Sarr's 2016 book analysed the empty land hypothesis from a Senegambian perspective, for example, and critiqued the materiality of the Hopkins land–labour formulation. Sarr argued that for many in Senegambia, land was not ‘empty’ but was instead imbued with spiritual power that rendered it economically ‘unproductive’.Footnote ² From a different perspective, Mariana Candido's forthcoming book challenges the idea that land ownership was rejected by societies across precolonial Africa.Footnote ³ Other scholars are also exploring how the ‘empty land hypotheses’ grew out of a long history of imperial justifications for occupation — deriving from the early experiences in the Americas.

None of this is to say that the surplus land hypothesis should be unilaterally rejected. One of the great insights of Hopkins's new introduction is the way in which historical trends and ideas often circle back around to foundational conceptions. Concepts’ lingering power make it all the more vital to understand the context in which they were developed, and Hopkins writes with great clarity about the influences that shaped his book. Conceived as a critique of modernisation theory, his promotion of a market-oriented study of the African continent's economic history emerged at exactly the same time as the dependency school was taking shape (Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa was published just the year before, in 1972). Dependency school partisans — whether Marxist economists or historians — critiqued his book as a ‘bourgeois textbook’, and Hopkins is clear as to how his approach diverges from dependency theory (and its step-child, the ‘reversal of fortune’ thesis) through its insistence on the relevance of African agencies and institutions in the continent's economic histories.

Indeed, Hopkins's impact on the field has been marked especially in the way in which his insistence on a market-oriented approach led to a resolution in the once-fierce debate between formalists and substantivists. Formalists like Hopkins asserted that market principles were more or less universal, and thus applied the principles to the African context, whereas substantivists asserted that indigenous approaches to value had to be incorporated into an understanding of economic activity. One of Hopkins's most enduring legacies was the triumph of formalists in the school of African economic history. But one consequence which was also significant was the fact that substantivism lived on in different academic disciplines, notably in the economic anthropology on markets and value pioneered by Jane Guyer and David Graeber. Graeber — originally a specialist on Madagascar — is one of the most influential economic thinkers of the past four decades, and so in many ways the debate has endured outside of the confines of the discipline of African economic history.Footnote ⁴

One of the foci of Hopkins's new introduction is the state of the precolonial historiography and its significance for the future of the field. Hopkins encourages greater research on the connections between precolonial economies and polities. Yet while his approach to the precolonial is foregrounded, he also suggests that the transition to colonial rule and the ‘crisis of adaptation’ is perhaps even more significant for the historiography of the continent. As he notes, this concept has been widely challenged, as has the question of when the true crisis in the West African economic framework caused by the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade took place. It is certainly the case that the nineteenth century represented an opportunity for many African entrepreneurs, as scholars such as K.O. Dike have shown. And yet it is hard to dispute the validity and relevance of Hopkins's overall conclusion: ‘The attempt to integrate West Africa into the international economy through the exercise of informal influence had failed . . .the outcome was a form of structural adjustment imposed by military force and supervised subsequently by colonial rule’ (24).

Returning to a classic text after many years is a valuable and important task. Re-reading this book and its new introduction, we are reminded how it has shaped many debates, opened up new fields and opportunities for scholars from many different parts of the world, and shaped the renewed excitement and rediscovery of African economic history of the past decade — as seen in the emergence of the African Economic History Network and the work of Gareth Austin, Nathan Nunn, and Karin Pallaver, among other scholars. Many readers will disagree with Hopkins's approach, but this is not the point of a book like this. All will surely agree that the book's lasting value is to stimulate new ideas, new discussions, and to open up avenues which others will pursue and disseminate. Hopkins's book has been instrumental in emphasising the importance of African economic history since being first published in 1973, and it remains so today.

In classic self-deprecating style, Hopkins concludes his new introduction with an anecdote. Shortly after his book was published, his Head of School at Birmingham University asked to discuss it with him, and announced that ‘you could not have written it 10 years ago, and would not want to write it in 10 years’ time’. As the years passed, Hopkins writes, he understood the comment far better: the seasoned historian's gathering awareness of the complexities of causation, agency, intention, and location make it ever more impossible for them to ‘maintain a line of argument while trying to incorporate some of the innumerable complications that were inescapable consequences of the passage of time and the accumulation of knowledge’ (43). It is one of the great achievements of An Economic History of West Africa's new edition that it takes account of those complexities, while remaining true to the strength of the original argument that Tony Hopkins's younger self had the chutzpah and vision to attempt.