A History of Malawi 1859-1966

A History of Malawi 1859-1966. By John McCracken. Woodbridge, UK: James Currey, 2012. Pp. xviii, 485; maps, photographs, bibliography, index, glossary. $99.00/£60.John McCracken is one of the masters of Africanist historiography, and this awe-inspiring book represents the summation of a life devoted to the study of Malawi's colonial past. The author of Politics and Christianity in Malawi, 1875-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977)-a classic that still merits re-reading as a pioneering analysis of the politics and socioeconomic consequences of African conversion-and of countless influential articles on, inter alia, the histories of Malawian colonial agriculture, conservationism, and policing, McCracken has now delivered his long-awaited magnum opus.Written with McCracken's trademark lucidity and attention to detail, A History of Malawi is explicitly modeled on A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), whose author, John Iliffe, was McCracken's contemporary in Cambridge in the late 1950s, and later, colleague in the heyday of the history department of the University of Dar es Salaam. At a time in which global history is all the rage, the unashamedly national framework of A History of Malawi and its understated theoretical ambitions may raise some eyebrows. A close reading of the book, however, shows that McCracken successfully avoids the pitfalls of both nationalist history ("too narrowly" focused on "nation-building" movements and institutions [p. 3]) and of its "once fashionable 'underdevelopment' alternative" (which "oversimplifies the impact of capitalism" in Malawi and other imperial peripheries [p. 4]). Rather, what McCracken's approach foregrounds is the dynamic interplay between imperial action and African agency in the shaping of the modem history of a country where widespread economic deprivation and grassroots resourcefulness were-and are-inextricably entwined with one another.Following in the footsteps of his one-time mentor, Terence Ranger, McCracken's understanding of African agency is sufficiently subtle and ecumenical as to make room for much more than overt political resistance to the colonial order. Thus, although religiousand nationalist-inspired revolts occupy a prominent place in the narrative (McCracken devotes one chapter to the Chilembwe Rising and as many as four to African politics between 1943 and 1964, the year of independence), central themes running through many of the book's sixteen substantive chapters also include: the inculturation of Christianity-a process that began earlier and had probably more profound effects in Malawi than elsewhere in British-controlled Central Africa; the experiences of Malawian labor migrants-whom McCracken rightly refuses to cast in the role of powerless victims shorn of ambitions and freedom of action; and the odds-defying emergence of independent African cash-crop producers in a politico-economic context skewed in favor of the interests of a small group of large-scale European planters owning nearly half of the best agricultural land in the southern part of the colony and drawing on a captive tenant labor force. …