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THE BRITISH EMPIRE IN AFRICA

across the continent. For example, he could have sharpened his argument by considering David Schoenbrun’s insight that modern African societies and polities are best understood when seeing the ways in which ‘durable bundles of meaning and practice’ from the deep precolonial period continue to shape them. Death’s ideas would have also benefited from considering specific work by Schoenbrun and others, including Steven Feierman, that has considered the relationship between political authority and control over the environment across the longue durée in Africa, questions that lie at the core of Death’s study. Nonetheless, this book should be required reading for environmental historians of Africa. It provides a rich and critical overview of the ways in which people in and outside the continent have engaged politically and created ecological policies in the context of the ever-increasing threat of climate change. Death writes with an urgency appropriate to the enormity of the crisis that faces Africa. For historians, the book is a reminder that we must pay heed to and consider in our own scholarly endeavors how the past shapes the present, and future, of the continent.