Thornton's aim is to examine African warfare of the slave-trade centuries as one would examine any other region's — weapons, tactics, organisation, logistics — using the primary record rather than inherited generalities. Goody had proposed that ecology dictated political form, with savannah cavalry breeding oligarchy and forest archers something more democratic until imported firearms let rulers concentrate power; later close reading dismantled most of that.

The second framework is the military revolution: artillery, handheld guns, mass infantry, paid standing armies, fiscal bureaucracy, treated as a universal ladder of progress. Africa is either absent from that literature or filed under backwardness, its adoption of guns explained away through the gun-slave cycle.

Thornton counters that armies succeed when they accomplish what their commanders set out to do, not when they resemble European ones. Centralisation is a social outcome, not a measure of effectiveness — and in Angola, the one theatre of sustained conflict, Europeans fared poorly and borrowed local method.