'The virtues to the book are many: its writers have synthesised and summarized a vast amount of material and organised it into a coherent whole. Scholars and students acquainted with a single small area of Africa will now be able to place this in perspective by reference to what was occuring elsewhere in the continent. The book has an excellent index and it is well printed on good paper. In short, it is all that one might expect a Cambridge history to be.' New Society