The introduction to this volume argues that neither the European nor the Islamic vantage point will carry a history of Africa across these eighty years, since each illuminates only part of the continent.

Its central move is over vocabulary. What later writers dismissed as tribalism, the editors argue, was nationality: loyalty to a common language and social order, often among millions of people, which in Europe would be called by that name. Asante, Zulu, Ganda and Hausa-Fulani are treated accordingly as nations, several of them mature well before 1790.

After that date something new appears — states that expanded by absorbing outsiders into the ruling group's language and religion rather than holding them as tributaries. Shaka's age regiments turned captured men into Zulu; in the Sokoto caliphate Islamic political thought displaced older Hausa loyalties. European example will not account for this, though European pressure told in the north. Long-distance trade, the editors suggest, is the likelier engine.