The process of normal scholarship leads young historians to focus on their fields of research with an intensity that is unparalleled during their academic careers. It is no wonder that after a certain interval many change directions, if only to escape the tyranny of the overly familiar. Occasionally, however, we encounter a new approach to our old questions, which forcibly brings us back to our original topic, not with the initial ardor but with the nostalgia of suddenly coming across the photograph of a teenager's crush.

Such was my response to discovering Christopher Schmitz's, “The Changing Structure of the World Copper Market, 1870-1939,” in a recent number of the Journal of European Economic History. I wondered just how I would have approached my study of the Central African mines if, between 1963 and 1983, I had had access to this account of the copper industry in its global setting. Mind you, my thirty-one years' experience with undergraduates and master's candidates suggests that it might have made no difference to me at all. So intense is the concentration of our apprentice-historians on their primary materials that it is often difficult to get them to consider contexts beyond those inherent in the sources they use.

What was new about Schmitz's synthesis? That is difficult to isolate. He has, indeed, written a series of studies of the copper industry. The article under discussion offers generalizations about the industry as a whole between 1870 and 1939 and the role of various producers and consumers in it for the same period. For the sake of Africanist readers, let me summarize them.