All too often African history is treated as a topic either entirely divorced from the rest of global history or one that is entirely determined by forces beyond the continent. Older scholarship notoriously labeled Africa a continent “without history” and even more recent studies have at times viewed it entirely through the lens of colonialism and the slave trade - not allowing for any agency on the part of Africans themselves. Obviously this is a very limited way of viewing an entire continent’s history - lots happened in Africa before the arrival of Europeans and plenty happened there besides exploitative actions taken by those Europeans once they arrived. I found Toby Green’s book an engaging antidote to old fashioned views of African history that still persist in popular understanding of the continent.