This review provides a new interpretative framework for the ‘Neolithic’ in East Africa. A seriation of pottery assemblages is used to delineate several archaeological traditions, the implications of which include rejection of the use of the terms ‘Neolithic’ and ‘Pastoral Neolithic’, and the demise of previous attempts at archaeological—linguistic correlations. Evaluation of the dating evidence brings into question the validity of early dates for domestic stock and cultivated crops in the region. A new model for the development of specialized herd management strategies in the Central Rift Valley is outlined. This model rests upon the definition of pastoralism as an ideological system rather than as a subsistence strategy. Finally, the archaeological evidence for the antecedents of the early pastoral communities of East Africa is examined and the ascription of some of these assemblages to the ‘aquatic civilization of Middle Africa’ is questioned.

This article first explains the importance of the history of smoking pipes for other historical questions, especially in West Africa, where pipe styles are used to date archaeological levels. A survey of the major theories about African smoking and pipes is presented. This is followed by a review of the published archaeological literature pertaining to smoking pipes found at various sites from around the continent. The various controversies surrounding African smoking customs are then looked at in the light of the available evidence. The most likely hypothesis is that cannabis was smoked in water pipes in eastern and southern Africa before the introduction of tobacco. Further research is called for to prove or disprove this hypothesis. Tobacco is shown to have been introduced to West Africa from eastern North America, most likely by the French coming to Senegambia, though possibly by Moroccans coming to Timbuktu.

The rise of Lagos, which became the principal port of the ‘Slave Coast’ at the end of the eighteenth century, can only be understood by reference to the interaction between the European Atlantic trade and the indigenous canoe-borne trade along the coastal lagoons. European traders in the sixteenth century used the Lagos channel and the lagoon to approach the Ijebu kingdom, where slaves and cloth were purchased, but this trade lapsed in the seventeenth century. The Lagos settlement originated as a fishing hamlet, but was occupied as a military base by Benin around the end of the sixteenth century. Benin expansion to the west may have been designed to prevent European trade with Ijebu, in the interests of a Benin monopoly. Lagos remained formally subject to Benin until the nineteenth century, but the decline of Benin power in the eighteenth century left it effectively independent. European sources of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries attest trade in cloth and slaves passing along the lagoons through Lagos to Allada and Whydah in the west. Although this pattern of trade has been assumed to date back to pre-European times, it was more probably a consequence of the European presence, and more specifically of the westward drift of European interest along the coast from Benin after the sixteenth century. European traders began to show an active interest in the lagoon trade to the east of Allada in the early eighteenth century, and again began to explore the possibility of using the Lagos channel to bapproach the inland lagoons. Lagos developed as an Atlantic port from the 1760s, exporting slaves and Ijebu cloth, but its importance was limited by its remoteness from any major source of slaves. Its emergence as a major port in the late eighteenth century was due to the disruption of slave shipments from ports further west by military pressure from Dahomey, which led to the diversion of slave supplies eastward along the lagoons for shipment from Lagos.

It has long been held by historians of the Gold Coast and more recently by historians of slavery and emancipation in Africa that the formal abolition of slavery by the British colonial government in 1874 had little discernible impact on that institution per se or on the socio-economic and political status quo in the late nineteenth-century Gold Coast. This was so, it is argued, largely because the relatively benign nature of domestic slavery and other forms of involuntary servitude in the nineteenth-century Gold Coast tended to minimize the demand for emancipation from among the servile population in the Gold Coast after formal emancipation in 1874. A wider survey of the available evidence and a reappraisal of official sources suggest, however, that not only is this view of the consequences of abolition misleading, but it has also helped to perpetuate some equally misleading myths concerning the nature and role of slavery and other forms of servitude in the nineteenth-century Gold Coast. What is demonstrated is that the servile response to abolition in the Gold Coast was much greater than historians have hitherto believed and that this was a spontaneous reaction on the part of this class against what were increasingly exploitative and oppressive forms of slavery and servitude in the nineteenth century. The latter, it is shown, was a prominent by-product of the process of socio-economic change in the nineteenth-century Gold Coast which has all but been ignored by historians, most of whom have been taken in by what is described as the official mythology of domestic slavery in the Gold Coast. This official mythology which was rooted in the belief that slavery and other forms of servitude in the Gold Coast were domestic or patriarchal in character and relatively benign in practice was, it is argued, simply an attempt to rationalize the retention of an institution which was essential to the operation of the system of legitimate trade in the nineteenth-century Gold Coast. The extent of the servile response to formal emancipation in 1874 was a surprise, however, to inexperienced British officials on the Gold Coast who had come to believe in their own mythology, so that abolition presented a short-lived crisis for the British colonial administration. Successive colonial administrations on the Gold Coast, therefore, were forced to all but nullify the operation of the abolition ordinances of 1874 until the advent of a colonial economy after 1900 made traditional forms of involuntary labour expendable.

Until the Second World War, at least, tropical Africa constituted harsh and difficult terrain for Western capitalism — a region where financial loss, erosion of the capital base and ignominious failure were as likely for the expatriate or metropolitan firm as profitability or growth of turnover. This simple fact has been obscured in recent years both by the practice of business history which, in Africa as elsewhere, tends to concentrate upon the relative handful of enterprises which prospered and survived, and by dependency/underdevelopment theory which stresses Western capital's penetration into, and its re-ordering of, non-capitalist societies. That many European firms failed to make an effective entry, however, deserves to be reiterated, and the reasons for lack of success need closer investigation if acceptable conclusions are to be drawn about the character and consequences of European business activity in Africa. Such are the aims of the present article, which evaluates the brief history of twenty-two British companies set up to engage in rubber production in East Africa shortly before the First World War. It seeks to answer two questions — how is their presence to be explained and, more importantly, what factors frustrated their ambitions ? — and hopes to illustrate comparative international aspects of British corporate activity and investment. The failure of British rubber-planting initiatives in East Africa, it will be argued, was the obverse, and indeed a direct consequence, of successful British rubbercultivation in South and South-East Asia.