War in Pre-Colonial Eastern Africa: the patterns and meanings of state-level conflict in the nineteenth century/Slavery in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa

RICHARD REID, War in Pre-Colonial Eastern Africa: the patterns and meanings of state-level conflict in the nineteenth century. Oxford: British Institute in Eastern Africa, in association with James Currey (hb £55 - 978 1 84701 604 1; pb £16.95 - 978 1 84701 605 8). 2007, xvi+256 pp.

HENRI MÉDARD and SHANE DOYLE (eds), Slavery in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa. Oxford: James Currey (hb £55 - 978 1 84701 602 7; pb £17.95 - 978 1 84701 603 4). 2007, xiv+273 pp.

These two books represent very welcome additions to the growing corpus of publications by James Currey in the field of African history, especially because they deal with specifically pre-colonial history, against the general modern trend of concentration upon more recent times. They also deal with matters which hitherto have suffered general neglect. Their simultaneous publication is appropriate in that they complement each other well; their respective subjects, warfare and slavery, evidently overlap, the principal mechanism of enslavement in pre-colonial Africa being capture in warfare.

The history of pre-colonial warfare, which is the subject of Richard Reid's book, has attracted only limited scholarly attention, and those general studies which have been undertaken (most notably by Robert Smith and John Thornton)...