Based on a co-taught course, Myles Osborne and Susan Kingsley Kent's survey of British engagement with Africa from the seventeenth century, Africans and Britons in the Age of Empires, 1660–1980, attempts to enliven the story by focusing on the actors. The personalities, contingencies, and complex motives of both African and British individuals, and not the grand designs of a “monolithic empire,” are therefore the focus of their study. Each chapter begins with a vignette about one of these individuals and sets out key themes, which include precolonial contact, the Scramble and colonial rule, decolonization, and postcolonial adjustment. This chronological approach is effective, especially for broadening students’ understanding of African agency and complicating the picture of colonialism. The structure of the book's chapters would work well as the spine of a course on colonialism in Africa, or specifically on British colonialism in Africa; or it could be useful as a text running alongside others in a broader survey of the British Empire.
The book's structure is as follows. The opening two chapters cover the precolonial period. In the first, Osborne and Kent address the slave trade and move on to abolition and the early settlement of West and South Africa. Here they do an especially good job of synthesizing the historiography of the impact of the slave trade and its abolition on African development. In chapter 2 they consider the mid-nineteenth century as an era of missionary, commercial, and exploratory encounters, but also as an era marked by African agency. African merchants and missionaries like Samuel Ajayi Crowther had an important role in expanding both Christianity's reach and British palm oil extraction, even as British explorers like David Livingstone added new regions to the British sphere of influence.
Then the history of colonialism begins in earnest. The third chapter, on the Scramble for Africa, combines both “top down” British (and European) state actions with the situation on the ground created by African political and environmental factors, and especially by commercial entities like Goldie's United Africa Company or Rhodes's British South Africa Company. Next, Osborne and Kent cover the period of “effective occupation” and violent resistance—including the South African War—that accompanied the imposition of colonial rule. In both chapters, they maintain a delicate balance in presenting, in synthesis, the full range of Africanist and imperial historiography related to the scramble, occupation, and resistance.
Some of the book's strongest sections focus on the first half of the twentieth century. The fifth chapter, “Africans in the White Man's Wars,” is one of the most effective. In it Osborne and Kent clearly demonstrate the importance of Africa to Britain's successes in the World Wars, while also explaining the fluctuating relationship between empire, colonies, and colonized in the turbulent period of 1914 to 1945. In “The Road to Independence,” they then discuss the postwar situation as the agitation of demobilized African soldiers and the rise of political tribalism combined with Britain's economic decline and the geopolitical realities of the Cold War to make independence seem within reach. “Independence for Africans and Britons” succeeds in examining the impact of empire on both Britain's former African colonies and Britain itself.
Finally, an epilogue considers the legacy of colonialism, its political uses, and popular memory in both independent African countries and Britain itself. Here, Osborne and Kent use the 2011 Mau verdict in Britain and Robert Mugabe's neocolonialism claims to great effect. Students should finish this book with a more nuanced understanding of British-African relations.
Osborne and Kent provide good overviews of the major historiographical debates: the impact of the slave trade and its abolition; the creation of “tribes”; concepts of collaboration and resistance; the roles of missionaries as imperial agents; the rise of developmentalism; and so forth. Bibliographies at the ends of chapters offer quick guides to further reading, highlighting major works in the field. The treatments of some topics, such as gender and Mau reparations, are at the cutting edge. Others, such as missionary historiography, are a bit older and maybe lack some of the newest research.
Although there are points throughout the book—especially in the chapters on the World Wars and decolonization and its legacy—where the influence of Africans on British metropolitan policy or culture comes across, the book could just as easily have been named “Britain's African Empire,” as it tells a pretty standard (though detailed) story of Britain's imperial encounter, engagement, colonization, conflict, and decolonization. What is new and helpful for teaching is the inclusion of African agents—missionaries, political leaders, and commercial actors—in that traditional story of the colonization of Africa by Britons.
For the readers of this journal, Africans and Britons in the Age of Empires, 1660–1980 is an important and extremely useful new teaching text. It is a rare specimen because it brings together the full history of British contact with Africa, not limiting itself to the slave trade, or the Scramble, or decolonization, as so many do. For this reason especially, it would be useful as a teaching resource for a course on British imperialism, particularly a course that wanted to take Africanist historiography of empire seriously.
