The work of historical and comparative linguists has long interested African historians. By classifying languages into families, linguists provide models of their historical development that may point to historical events and processes that occurred among peoples speaking those languages. Once classified, linguists can then reconstruct earlier forms of present languages, thus providing direct evidence of words, their meanings and historical influences in the past. Finally, linguists seek to explain innovations that are revealed in their reconstructions by pointing to a combination of internal linguistic developments and different forms of contact that occurred among speakers of different languages.

Simple classification, based largely on counting cognate words in related languages (a technique known as lexicostatistics), is still a very common activity, however, and thus the one most historians rely on, but lexicostatistics gives only a very limited, and often deceptive, view of language history. Historians should thus be aware of its limitations as well as the potential of a number of important techniques now employed by linguists, including the Comparative Method, reconstruction of ancestral languages, and contact models.

Since 1969 archaeological, paleobotanical and ethnographic research in Kagera region, north-western Tanzania (Map 1), have contributed to a deep-time understanding of the ecological history of that region. The primary insight that develops out of this interdisciplinary research is that changes in the ecology of the region can be linked directly to the productive economy and the cultural values of its inhabitants. The development of iron technology and settled agricultural life are the primary components in understanding the environmental changes that arose in this region over the last two millennia or more. This paper provides an overview of the most salient observations derived from this research program. I will begin with a short review of the history of Iron Age settlement, technology and major alterations made to the environment that form the backdrop to the specific reconstructions of forest exploitation gleaned from charcoal excavated from iron-smelting furnaces and from reconstructions of vegetational changes based on palynology.

The ancient Egyptians tended to consider both their immediate and more remote neighbours either as excellent sources of luxury trade items and slaves, at times of political power and strength, or as uncivilized forces threatening to destroy and overwhelm the Egyptian Nile Valley. This was true not only of cultures within Africa; those in the Aegean, the Levant, Cyprus and Mesopotamia also were viewed from one or the other perspective, occasionally both at the same time. All these, together with Nubia and Libya, have received much scholarly attention and, whilst we probably will never fully understand their ancient relationship to Egypt, we have a fairly good idea, ‘hearing’ the story from both sides when surviving evidence allows, what their attitudes towards each other were at various times in their history.

This article deals with what is surely the least investigated aspect of ancient Egyptian relations with its neighbours, simply because we know comparatively little about the two major successive cultures concerned – Punt and Aksum – in the ancient world.

This paper examines the role of the imperial and colonial governments in the formulation of policy towards the Nigerian palm oil export industry between 1939 and 1949. It argues that for most of the war years colonial officials in Nigeria accepted that metropolitan needs and conditions should dictate policy in the oil palm produce industry. However, towards the end of the war, they began to question whether policies centred around the requirements of the metropole would preserve the future competitiveness of the industry. Thereafter, they pressed for measures which gave priority to the problems and necessities of the local industry and the colonial economy. While colonial policy was sensitive to the concerns of imperial and local government officials, for most of the period under review it was reluctant, and on occasions, unable to accommodate the measures necessary to harmonize imperial and colonial goals. Consequently, the anticipated expansion in palm oil exports failed to materialize and the future competitiveness of the industry remained in doubt.

This article fills an important void in the current literature on the Nigerian palm oil export industry. To date insufficient attention has been paid to the thinking within imperial and colonial government circles which underpinned the policies adopted in the industry during World War II and the early post-war years, and which led to the failure of policy makers to achieve their objectives. Moreover, the current literature ignores the vigorous debate between the Colonial Office and the Nigerian colonial government, and among colonial government officials, over the best means by which the needs of the local palm oil industry could be reconciled with the demands of the metropole, especially between 1942 and 1949.

The last twenty years have seen a series of studies dealing, at least in part, with the nineteenth-century history of slavery at the East African coast. Each has, in its own way, focused on transformations associated with changing patterns of accumulation in the nineteenth century. If there has been a general theme it is of the increasing constraints placed upon slaves and the increasing demands made on them, as owners sought to reorganize labour time and processes to take advantage of the new opportunities offered by the rapid expansion of commerce from the 1830s. While Morton has attacked Cooper's ‘hegemonic’ perspective and accused him of presenting slavery as benign and static, both are agreed on a basic trend: the increasingly commercial orientation of slave-based agriculture considerably diminished slave autonomy between 1820 and 1890. Recently, Glassman has offered a study which is decidedly non-hegemonic in perspective, and has revealed the ways in which marginal members of society appropriated and sought to reinterpret the ideology through which they were subordinated. Yet he too describes the increasing circumscription of slave autonomy in response to the demands of new kinds of production – in his case, the sugar plantations of the Pangani valley.