Wracked by the ravages of the slave trade and Ngoni incursions from the south, Malawi's precolonial political and economic systems were, to put it mildly, in a state of flux at the close of the nineteenth century. European colonization coincided with this period of local political instability. Europeans entered the region as traders, missionaries, and adventurers who, wittingly or not, found themselves caught up in webs of local intrigue and the shifting political and economic alliances born of them. As McCracken observed: “Malawi by the 1870s was less a land of chaos than of fluidity, with confusion resulting not from the absence of political systems but from the presence of too many clashing and competing ones.” In addition to the plethora of competing political actors with whom they had to contend, Europeans encountered political systems marked by a clear tension between centralizing political forces and those bent on retaining local autonomy based on village or clan governance. These competing claims for political legitimacy informed the way politics played out in the early colonial period.

Present day Malawi's geographic boundaries were fixed in 1897 when it came under British Foreign Office control as the British Central Africa Protectorate. It was renamed Nyasaland (land of the lake) in 1907, after its control was transferred to the Colonial Office. District boundaries changed over the course of the colonial period but the territory's boundaries did not (see map 1.1).