Songhay sources compiled in the seventeenth century portray the relationship between Gao, the political capital of the state, and Timbuktu, the religious and commercial centre, as abnormally important. The view is that Timbuktu was not only autonomous, but a source of important political influence over policy decisions at Gao. A consensus of contemporary scholars has embraced this depiction. In contrast, the present study argues that Timbuktu was not autonomous, but that Gao was sucessful in achieving its original objective in capturing the city: financial profit. In addition, the evidence is consistent in outlining the relatively negligible political influence of Timbuktu over Gao. The Timbuktu-centric chronicles are largely responsible for this distortion; it is therefore necessary to approach these sources with even greater caution. It is also desirable to re-examine the roles of other sahelian entrepots during the imperial Songhay period to determine more accurately their relative importance.

One of the principal objectives of foreign settlements in nineteenth-century West Africa was the establishment of extensive regular trade with Africans, especially residents of the distant, fabled interior. The attainment of this goal, however, proved very difficult. The most spectacular success was achieved by the British settlement at Sierra Leone, which in the early 1820s managed to establish substantial regular trade with the distant hinterland. Its early efforts to achieve this objective, however, were unsuccessful. Until 1818 the development of long-distance trade with the hinterland was impeded by the desultory nature of such efforts, Sierra Leone's opposition to slave trading, competition from established coastal marts, obstructions caused by intermediate states and peoples, and the weaknesses and limitations of the Colony's policy towards commerce and the interior. By 1821, however, the marked decline of the Atlantic slave trade in the neighbourhood of Sierra Leone, the active co-operation of Futa Jallon and Segu, two major trading states in the hinterland, and certain other important developments in the Colony and the interior, combined to establish such trade on a regular basis.

Since 1899 the idea has been widely held that the South African War was no isolated episode but one illuminating the fundamental characteristics of British expansion, both in the nineteenth century and beyond. Cross-reference between the particulars of South African history and theories of imperialism has long been a fact of intellectual life. This process, however, often seems to reflect less the fruitful interplay of new knowledge and evolving hypotheses than the progressive entrenchment of separate schools of thought. The purpose of this article is to highlight the gulf between different approaches, with reference to recent work; and to suggest that, notwithstanding the work of the last decade, little headway has been made in linking the development of South Africa's economy and mineral resources to the War of 1899 in any but the most general and self-evident of ways. It argues that the case for interpreting the origins of the war in the main from a metropolitan and political perspective retains considerable persuasiveness and explanatory power. Finally it puts forward an alternative way of seeing in the struggle representative features of British expansion.

Social control of trypanosomiasis in African history deserves further study. The pioneering work in this field is John Ford's respected but neglected The Role of the Trypanosomiases in African Ecology (1971). While Ford's arguments have received support from recent findings in immunological, epidemiological and epizootiological research, they have rarely met with evaluation or engagement, either in historical or scientific literature. Historians have tended to describe trypanosomiasis control as a matter of avoiding contact with tsetse fly. In so doing they have implicitly rejected the position of Ford, who regarded infrequent contacts between tsetse and mammalian hosts as necessary for the maintenance of host resistance. Ford believed that host resistance, rather than avoidance of tsetse, was the basis of trypanosomiasis control. The historical nature of Ford's work requires that a satisfactory evaluation of The Role of the Trypanosomiases make use of historical, as well as scientific, data. The evidence of trypanosomiasis and cattle-keeping from one region of north-eastern Tanzania supports Ford and suggests that other explanations of trypanosomiasis control are inadequate. The Tanzanian evidence shows that precolonial societies coexisted with, but could not avoid, tsetse. They could not eradicate tsetse because scarcity of water prevented permanent occupation of large areas. Tsetse and trypanosomiasis did not prevent cattle-keeping, but helped to keep the region's cattle population low and confined it to relatively densely settled neighbourhoods. Social control of trypanosomiasis collapsed during the pre-Second World War period of colonial rule. Economic and political developments were primarily responsible for a series of famines between 1894 and 1934. Famine-induced depopulation allowed steady spread of tsetse and wildlife reservoirs of trypanosomes into formerly cultivated areas which had been free of tsetse before the colonial period.

This article studies the expansion of tsetse fly in one part of Kenya Maasailand between 1900 and 1950. It follows the lines of investigation first suggested by Ford's work and examines in detail the interaction between changes in four elements in the Mara ecosystem: climate, vegetation, land use and tsetse. Tsetse was able to expand because its habitat expanded and the spread of bush and fly into the grasslands both caused, and was facilitated by, shifts in patterns of Maasai grazing and occupation in the area. Up to the 1890s, the Mara Plains were regularly grazed by Maasai herds; but the general depopulation of Maasailand in the aftermath of the rinderpest pandemic and civil war left the region vacant until after 1900 and allowed the spread of bush cover which was then colonised by tsetse. When Maasai returned, they altered their grazing patterns to avoid such areas. However, the progressive encroachment of tsetse-infested bush continued and was not halted until bush-clearing schemes and closer grazing forced the fly to retreat by destroying its habitat. The study is set within the wider context of ecological change and capitalist development in East Africa and suggests that the common assumption that colonial capitalism was responsible for the disruption of the ecosystem and, therefore, for the spread of disease and environmmental degradation needs careful re-examination in the light of a more sophisticated understanding of the processes of ecological change.

Events since 1974 have challenged fundamental assumptions about Ethiopian history, calling in question the country's borders and internal coherence, the nature of its social order, the centrality of its monarchy and Zionist ideology to the maintenance of the polity, and the viability of the peasant way of life. In so doing they challenge a young, but vigorous, historiography, one founded in the 1960s with the creation of a History Department at what is now Addis Ababa University and of an international coterie of scholars. Its early stages were marked by archivally-based studies of Ethiopia‘s international emergence in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and of trade and politics. Its later stages were marked by a steady growth in the number of contributors and in the emergence of major new themes many of which depend on the use of indigenous sources, both oral and written. Class and class relations; economy, state, and society; the Kushitic- and Omotic-speaking peoples; the use of social anthropology—such are the concerns of contemporary historians of Ethiopia. These concerns inform new work on agrarian issues and on the roots of famine, on urbanization, on the nature of the twentieth-century state, on the revolution itself and on the roots of resistance and social unrest, and on ethnicity. Meanwhile, more traditional work continues to glean insights from the manuscript tradition and to bring to light major new texts both Ethiopian and foreign. The article surveys this material and concludes by noting the persistence of certain limitations—the lack of work on women or on pastoralism, the scarcity of it on Islam, the heavy emphasis on that part of the country lying west of the Rift Valley, and the absence of an integrating synthesis—and the prospective integration of work on Ethiopia into the mainstream of African historiography.

This article describes the rapid growth and decline of the production of dura (Sorghum vulgare) in the frontier region adjoining the border of northwest Ethiopia, Sudan's Kassala Province, and the southwest frontier of Italian Eritrea between c. 1900 and the 1920s. This short-lived agricultural revolution resulted less from the slow, incremental adaptation of local agriculture than from a conjuncture of events, including the presence of a fertile but depopulated vertisol plain (the Mazega), the rise of a major food market in Eritrea, the availability of archaic forms of labour, the presence of entrepreneurial managers, and the immature state of colonial/imperial interests in the region. The precipitous decline of food production in the region in the early 1920s resulted from the dissolution of this historical conjuncture. The article concludes by suggesting that African history in general and agricultural history in particular has tended to be ‘Whiggish’, emphasizing progressive change at the expense of conjunctural and often short-lived episodes.