The appearance of these two books marks the continuation of what has been a veritable resurgence of interest in Ugandan history in the last decade or so, facilitated in part by the relative stability provided by Yoweri Museveni's presidency. The renaissance dates to the early and mid-1990s: while scholars of a more senior generation published work which seemed to encapsulate several decades' thinking on the region – Christopher Wrigley and Jean-Pierre Chrétien foremost among them – a new generation turned its attention to Uganda in a manner that had not been possible since the 1960s. A number of doctoral theses produced by European and North American scholars during the 1990s have progressed into monograph form or given rise to flurries of articles. Holly Hanson's book is part of that wave; Gardner Thompson's research was undertaken a little earlier, but the Ph.D. thesis that forms the basis of his book was completed at the beginning of the 1990s. While not all of this work has been concerned with Buganda, it is clear that the kingdom continues to loom large in the scholarly imagination. The centrality of Buganda in Ugandan history is a theme which has linked together much of the work of the last decade, in terms of the nature of the precolonial kingdom, its relationship with the British and its role in the protectorate, and later independent nation, of Uganda. Other critical issues have been raised, too, such as the need to revisit both the precolonial and the colonial pasts, and discontinuity, in terms of understanding the degree to which the colonial ‘moment’ was as disruptive as it was transitory.

THE Anglophone literature has conceptualized the history of the African ‘space’ through two major approaches. Fine-grained reconstructions of land disputes have helped to illuminate colonial changes in the political and economic control over residential and productive units, and to assess the local (im)possibilities for Africans of accumulating landed property and/or penetrating the new plantation and market economy. More recently, environmental studies have encouraged historians to uncover how fundamental alterations in the relationships between communities and their physical environment have been shaping ancient and recent struggles for identities and socio-political resources. Meanwhile, renewed attention to cognitive notions of space by anthropologists on the one hand, and literary critics on the other, has delineated deep structuring principles in the ideological construction of space among Africans and colonizers. Few historians have followed through, however, and historicized such imaginaries. Among those who have done so, and have traced people's conceptual, commemorative and moral visions of land, fewer still have ventured beyond the boundaries of specific locales and societies. By reconstructing a longue durée history of the disruptions in both the physical and cognitive spaces of the Gabonese rainforest, Chris Gray's book stands as a major attempt to bridge these gaps.