Freedom is the secret topic of this essay—a topic political theorists can scarce let alone. Hence the following exploration into African kingship and slavery should be understood as part of a dialectic of freedom, as seen through its opposites.

The passing references to Western thinkers are meant to put the African ideas in a perspective of general intellectual history, which is permissible if only because the great tradition of political philosophy, after it was eradicated in the West, was preserved by the Arabic and Jewish scholars of Africa, Asia Minor, and Andalusia. Subsequently some versions of this tradition were diffused throughout Africa with the spread of Islam and Christianity.

One of the most interesting features of Balkan politics during the interwar period has been the spectacular rise of peasant movements and parties which have had a profound influence on the social structure of these societies. The only Balkan country which did not experience a strong peasant movement was Greece. As I will try to argue below, the development of Balkan peasantism can be seen to a large extent as a political reaction to the strains and disruptions created by the increasing penetration of Western capitalism into this underdeveloped part of the world. Since this penetration was as strong in Greece as in the other Balkan countries during the interwar period, the failure of Greek peasants to organise themselves politically poses an interesting problem for anyone concerned with the past and present development of modern Greek society.

The Nordic countries differ from other Western societies in their long histories of premarital sexual permissiveness. Yet, in spite of this general permissiveness, there are enormous variations in the frequency of illegitimacy and in the tolerance of it, both among the five Nordic countries and within each of them. Iceland is an exception; here the rate of illegitimacy is high throughout the country, and so is tolerance of it. Sweden appears to be moving in this direction, but the historical situation is more complex.

A historical survey of social scientific literature would undoubtedly disclose a tendency (analogous, perhaps, to that evident in popular fiction) toward faddishness. From time to time certain topics enjoy great popularity and seem to attract more than their share of investigation and debate. Such is the case with the study of revolution, which is currently deemed a quite ‘fashionable’ object of scientific research.

When the British arrived in Northern Nigeria in the early years of the century, one of their first acts was a Proclamation on Slavery (1901) which prohibited slave-raiding, abolished the legal status of slavery and declared that all those subsequently born of slave parents would be free, but which did not prohibit slaveholding as such. Faced with the existence of ancient and flourishing slavery systems, which probably involved several million men and women, it would have been altogether beyond the power of the British administration to have enforced any policy of immediate emancipation—and this quite apart from the sympathy that was felt for slave owners as a class.