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Author: John Iliffe

Format: Paperback

Africans: The History of a Continent is a wide ranging textbook on African history from prehistory to the 21st century. As a very high-level resource on African history, it works basically as well as you could hope for; any specific events or people are necessarily only briefly mentioned in order to provide examples for wider trends. Without being particularly familiar with the literature, it’s hard to say exactly how well the textbook has adapted to more recent advancements in scholarship, but it does seem as if, in particular, early sections on pre-history have been updated to account for current archaeological innovations. Beyond simply being a very solid high-level overview, the textbook heavily focuses on demography and demographic trends in different regions of the continent. In particular, Iliffe heavily emphasizes the role that environmental factors such as terrain and disease played in stunting the demographic growth of Africa since prehistory in a way that at least seems non-trivially true. Many of the calamities (or lack thereof) that have affected the African continent and its people, in this view, were directly or only slightly indirectly caused by the continent’s inability to support large concentrated populations and the difficulty of administering large states in the manner common throughout Eurasia through difficult terrain.

I thought reading this book was interesting (particularly its underlying demographic argument) and probably worth reading for the broader perspective on the continent (with the obvious caveat that any particular aspect of African history will require much more reading to get a fuller picture).