In 1899 the French Colonial Ministry parcelled out the greater part of the French Congo among various concession companies in imitation of a similar policy adopted earlier by the Congo Free State. British companies which had pioneered the trade found themselves being treated as squatters and interlopers subject to legal prosecutions. They claimed that the French government had infringed the provisions of the Berlin Act and called for the diplomatic support of the Foreign Office. Their call was backed by the British Chambers of Commerce.

For long British humanitarians had been decrying the treatment of Africans in the Congo basin whose lands were being expropriated, and they had repeatedly appealed to the British government to ensure that the provisions of the Berlin Act were enforced. Consequently, the British merchants and the humanitarians found common ground for agitation.

In the face of such a powerful combination the Foreign Office had to act and protracted Anglo-French negotiations ensued. They were brought to an end in 1906 when the French government, while maintaining the principle of concessions, agreed to compensate the British firms for their losses.

The article questions the contention that, in the process of partition and the delimitation of borders in Africa, no account was taken of local conditions. The possibility of indirect African influence on the process is examined. At least some of the treaties concluded between Europeans and African rulers were genuine, and regarded as a contractual obligation by both sides. There were cases of African rulers seeking to promote their political interests by entering into an alliance with Europeans. Such treaties were sometimes utilized by European powers in their negotiations with rivals, to support their territorial claims. There were some attempts to define colonial borders so that they coincided with the frontiers of traditional African politics. Thus, treaties between African rulers and Europeans played a role in the process of the partition. In this connexion, it is important to remember that traditional African polities were often polyethnic, or encompassed only a segment of an ethnic group, and did not correspond to the modern European concept of ‘nation states’. There were also occasions in which questions regarding the local economy and communications were considered when borders were delimited. The considerations employed may have been wrong. But it seems necessary to modify the generalization that local circumstances were disregarded in the border-making process.

The fourth radiocarbon list contains many new and important dates. Only isolated readings are still available from West Africa, but some later Iron Age sites have recently been dated. The first samples for the Kenya Highlands date food production in that region to the first millennium b.c., while important dates from Uganda confirm the traditional datings of Bigo and Bweyerore. Samples from Kilwa on the Tanzanian coast are somewhat at variance with other dating evidence.

Dates for the Angola Iron Age range between a.d. 760 and the fifteenth century, while the Leopard's Kopje industry of Rhodesia has been dated for the first time.

The list is completed with many isolated dates from all parts of the subcontinent.

As a contribution to the history of Britain's campaign for the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in the nineteenth century this article examines, first, the creation of various mixed commissions for the adjudication of vessels captured on suspicion of trading in slaves after the trade had been declared illegal; secondly, the composition of these mixed commissions and the way in which they functioned, with special reference to the several commissions sitting in Sierra Leone which for 25 years dealt with the majority of captured slave vessels; and thirdly, the reasons why after 1839, and especially after 1845, captured ships were increasingly taken before British vice-admiralty courts with the result that the mixed commissions were gradually allowed to run down, although most of them were not abolished until the Atlantic slave trade had been finally suppressed.

These notes on traditional market authority and market periodicity in West Africa are intended to draw attention to the neglect of a fascinating historico-anthropological field. Given the lack of any satisfactory typology of West African markets, generalizations about all types of market must be avoided—and certain erroneous assumptions relating to the traditional relationship of chief and market are called in question. Nor should it be assumed that Christaller's ‘central-place theory’ has any application in such regions as Yorubaland and Iboland, where rural periodic markets cannot be classified hierarchically as, for instance, they can be in rural China. Although daily (or continuous) markets which, both traditionally and today, occur only in the very largest centres of population, are typologically distinct from rural periodic markets, this is rather because of their high proportion of full-time vendors than because they are necessarily apices of an hierarchical market system.

Everywhere in West Africa there is a standard ‘market-week’ such that all the periodic markets in the locality are based on the same cycle. Although this has been well-known for centuries, few writers in English have been interested in mapping these weeks, or examining the relationship between them. After summarizing existing geographical material, which clearly establishes an association between 4- and 8-day market weeks (which are extraordinarily widespread in the forest zone), as well as some connexion between the 3- and 6-day market weeks, it is concluded that there are effectively only four common market weeks, viz. 3- (or 6-) day, 4- (or 8-) day, 5-day and 7-day. The 7-day market week prevails throughout Hausaland and many other Islamized savanna districts. The fact that it has existed for centuries throughout the Akan areas of southern Ghana and Ashanti (though hardly anywhere else in the forest zone) has not attracted the attention it deserves—the same applying to other questions, here posed though not answered, such as why the 4-day market week cuts right across some ethnic boundaries and not others.

The article concludes with brief notes on the two traditional types of market taxation in West Africa, tolls and stall-rents, emphasis being laid on the traditional lack of market taxation in Eastern Nigeria.

The army of Samori Ture in 1887 was recruited from four sources: the regular army of sofa (infantrymen with firearms), the conscripted reserve of kurustigi, detachments sent by chiefs under Samori's protection, and a cavalry force consisting in part, perhaps, of volunteers. The emphasis on infantry rather than cavalry differentiated it from the armies of other nineteenth-century Islamic reformers.

Among the factors which influenced the structure and tactics of the army, as well as the diplomatic and military strategy of the Samorian state, were the supply of firearms and horses. Initially the Samorian army was armed with muskets from the coast, primarily Freetown, and horses from the north-western part of the Sudan. From mid-1891 to mid-1892 the muskets were replaced with breechloaders and repeaters obtained by direct negotiation between Samori and Freetown traders, and during this period or before it an indigenous firearms industry was established. After this, the French advance cut Samori off, partially at least, from his sources of supply; from 1893–98 the search for new supply areas was a major preoccupation of the Samorian regime. Arms came from the Ivory Coast and the Gold Coast, and horses from the Mossi states. Here, as formerly in the west, Samori was able to use existing trade routes.

The outbreak of the First World War made unprecedented demands on the manpower resources of the British East Africa Protectorate (Kenya). To meet military requirements for labour, the colonial government followed a policy of recruitment of Africans, in which there was initially some confusion over method and the degree to which compulsion could be utilized. Criticism of the policy by European settlers and the press, part of a larger agitation for more settler influence in the war effort and for greater control over the labour potentiality of the African population, led to a clarification of policy in the Native Followers' Recruitment Ordinance of 1915, which finally established the conscription of African males for the carrier corps. African reluctance to serve was heightened by complaints about conditions, and there frequent attempts to evade conscription. The campaigns of 1917 made particularly heavy demands for military labour, and the government attempted to recruit as many able-bodied male Africans as possible, under the ‘Grand Levy’ organized by John Ainsworth. The settler community, aroused by the consequent labour shortage, renewed its campaign for measures to ensure a flow of labour from the reserves and for a greater degree of government control over the African population, setting the scene for post-war squabbles about labour. For the carriers, conditions at the front were very bad in 1917–18, and the problems of carriers returning home in poor health, only partly relieved by the welfare organization set up by Ainsworth, were complicated by famine and an influenza epidemic. The events left a lasting impression in the minds of the Africans of Kenya.

In contrast to Dr G. N. Sanderson's belief that ‘down to the collapse of the Mahdist state itself, the Mahdist alliance was the central feature of Menelik's diplomacy’, this article shows that Ethiopia's détente with the Sudan after 1896 was only one part of a carefully constructed, non-committal foreign policy designed to protect Ethiopia against all foreseeable eventualities. If there were anything central in the minds of Ethiopian policy-makers, it could only have been their uncertainty about the outcome of the events which were rapidly reaching a crisis point in the Sudan. Menelik therefore chose not to commit himself to any one policy toward the Sudan until the complicated situation there ran its course. At the same time, he pursued a line of diplomacy in the east and the south which would consolidate his victory over the Italians and which would materially strengthen his Empire.

This article deals with the reaction of the Colonial Office to the problems—commercial and military—posed for the Gambia by the outbreak of the First World War. It argues that in the Colonial Office discussions about these problems two distinctly different attitudes can be distinguished. The younger junior officials tended to advocate government intervention to ameliorate specific economic problems, while the political heads and senior officials remained firmly attached to the dogmas of laissez faire. Conversely, the former group did not share the doubts of the latter as to whether the dogmas of patriotic bravery should be made to apply to African natives.

The subject-matter—the dislocation of commerce consequent upon French failure to purchase her usual share of the groundnut crop, the ensuing financial difficulties of the Gambia government, defence problems revealed after the mis-identification of H.M.S. Highflyer—is based on material from the Colonial Office archives.

This article attempts to contribute towards an understanding of the rise of nationalism in Nigeria and in the Gold Coast by exploring a neglected theme, namely the economic policy of political organizations in the period between the two World Wars. Before about 1918 political organizations did not have a coherent economic policy. After World War I economic problems became more important, and political parties began to take account of them by formulating a programme of economic development. An attempt was made by a man named Tete-Ansa to implement this programme, but he proved unsuccessful. The persistence of economic discontent, together with the failure of moderate leadership, led to the rise of new leaders and to the development of a more radical policy at the close of the 1930's. It was this policy which won mass support, and which played a vital part in the achievement of independence after World War II.