David Birmingham dates his ‘modern Angola’ to around 1820, when an ascendant Portuguese monarchy began to consolidate and extend its presence in Angola beyond the coastal trading posts established over the previous three centuries. This brief and engaging volume charts the patterns of trade, migration and evangelisation that led to elite formation and ultimately to separate nuclei of nationalism in distinct regions of Angola.

The broad outlines of Birmingham's account are familiar enough. He examines the creole society that developed in and around Luanda, rooted in a slave economy; the networks associated with the pre-colonial Kongo kingdom, straddling the borders of today's Angola and Democratic Republic of Congo; and the trade routes from the Benguela coast to the Central Highlands that led to the incorporation of the Ovimbundu kingdoms into the political sphere of what we now know as Angola. What is remarkable about the book is the source material that Birmingham brings forth to add substance to this history of the Angolan nation – much of it comprising travellers' diaries but including also a rare account by a freed slave (p. 48) – and the eye for detail that enlivens the telling of it, often eccentric but no less poignant for that.

Three themes stand out. One is the ubiquity of slavery, the details and the terminology changing under the pressure of international norms, but its essence surviving in the forced labour of late colonialism and in the kidnappings practised by the rival armies in the years of intra-Angolan conflict. Another is the role of non-Portuguese foreigners, Boers, Hungarians and above all the British, whose presence in the story serves a reminder not to view Angola simply as the expression of a uniquely Portuguese colonial will. Indeed, if there is a lesson to be drawn about the particularity of Portuguese colonialism here, it is about how ready the Portuguese were, whether for lack of funds or lack of interest, to leave the dirty work of wealth extraction to others, be they Africans or Europeans. Finally, Birmingham does not admit a simplistic reading of Angolans' agency in the shaping of their destiny: his deft account of capital accumulation and class formation makes clear that Angolans were slave traders and slaves alike.

The chapters dealing with the period after independence take a different approach, without the kind of illustrative narrative material that makes the first half of the book so compelling. The coverage of the war years and after appears to rely on a synthesis of material from a variety of secondary sources. The book stands on its merits as a history, and it was not strictly necessary to bring the story right up to the present. In documenting events only months before the publication date, these final chapters sometimes feel breathless. The book's eminent contribution to our understanding of post-colonial Angola is in the continuities that it lays bare. Birmingham situates the war within the social divisions that he traces during his treatment of the colonial period, and his approach makes quite clear how through nearly 200 years and several successive and outwardly dissimilar regimes, the predatory relationship between elites and people has remained constant.