| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2 | The History Cooperative

Colin Newbury. Patrons, Clients, and Empire: Chieftaincy and Over-Rule in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. New York: Oxford University Press. 2003. Pp. xii, 328. $72.00.
It is a brave historian nowadays who admits that his or her current academic preoccupations began in the 1950s, but an unrepentant Colin Newbury tells us that imperial history at Oxford University is peculiarly marked by continuity. He says that literary theory has dominated the study of discourse for too long (although presumably not at Oxford), and it is time to get back to the study of political discourse using the time-honored model of patron-client relations.	1
Drawing on his extensive knowledge of African and Pacific imperial history, with the addition of material on South and Southeast Asia, Newbury presents a well researched and cogently argued case for the persistence of precolonial clientage networks in certain British and French colonies. Patron-client modeling was refined by social scientists in the 1960s and 1970s, when it became a useful way of explaining why independence had brought relatively little change to the administrative systems of former colonies. That political and economic relations in some colonies can be analyzed effectively using this theory is clear; whether the exercise speaks to wider debates about empire is another question. The omission of colonies of settlement, along with almost all of the Portuguese, Dutch, and German empires, weakens the case considerably.	. . .

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