| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Sub-Saharan Africa

Gareth Austin. Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana: From Slavery to Free Labour in Asante, 1807–1956. (Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora.) Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press. 2005. Pp. xxiv, 589 $75.00.

Gareth Austin describes his long-awaited book on the changing economic conditions in the precolonial and colonial world of the Asante as representing a "personal act of persistence" in an "academic environment" that "discourage[s] the kinds of projects which require a long time ... and ... substantial space for proper presentation and analysis" (p. xvii). It is the result of a quarter of century of research, portions of which he has already published in journal form as well as in edited works. This work goes significantly beyond these contributions, however, and in its length and scope it compares with other pioneering and magisterial works on Ghanaian history such as Ivor Wilks's Asante in the Nineteenth Century: The Structure and Evolution of a Political Order (1975), and David Kimble's A Political History of Ghana 1850–1928 (1963). Although the focus is the Asante world, the work shares an important similarity with Kimble's study of the rise of Ghanaian nationalism in that it links the precolonial and colonial worlds. This particularly innovative aspect of the study allows Austin to trace how precolonial economic institutions, under both internal and external forces, adapted to the increasingly more commercial and export-oriented economy of the colonial period.

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