¹ Rattray's, principal contributions are Ashanti Proverbs: The Primitive Ethics of a Savage People (Oxford, 1916)Google Scholar; Ashanti (Oxford, 1923)Google Scholar; Religion and Art in Ashanti (Oxford, 1927)Google Scholar; Ashanti Law and Constitution (Oxford, 1929)Google Scholar; Akan-Ashanti Folk Tales (Oxford, 1930)Google Scholar. There is a bibliography of Rattray's writings in McCaskie, T. C., ‘R. S. Rattray and the construction of Asante history: an appraisal’, History in Africa, x (1983), 187–206CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See, too, Von Laue, T. H., ‘Transubstantiation in the study of African reality’, African Affairs, lxxiv (1975), 401–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Anthropology and power: R. S. Rattray among the Ashanti’, African Affairs, lxxv (1976), 33–54Google Scholar. I would like here to record my gratitude to the late Noel Machin for allowing me access to his unpublished biography of Rattray, and to the late M. Fortes for numbers of discussions about Rattray. For Fortes’ views see crucially Fortes, M., Kinship and the Social Order: The Legacy of Lewis Henry Morgan (London, 1969)Google Scholar; see, too, his ‘Kinship and marriage among the Ashanti’, in Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. and Forde, D. (eds.), African Systems of Kinship and Marriage (London, 1950), 252–84Google Scholar; and ‘The submerged descent line in Ashanti’, in Schapera, I. (ed.), Studies in Kinship and Marriage (London, 1963), 58–67Google Scholar; and Time and Social Structure and Other Essays (London, 1970).Google Scholar Fortes' views of his own project are outlined in Fortes, M., ‘Custom and conscience in anthropological perspective’, The International Review of Psychoanalysis, iv (1977), 127–54Google Scholar (the text of the Ernest Jones Memorial Lecture of the British Psychoanalytical Society, London, 1973); and ‘Prologue’ ‘Introduction’, in Legon Family Research Papers I: Domestic Rights and Duties in Southern Ghana (IAS, Legon, 1974), 1–34.Google Scholar Rattray's Mss. are in the Royal Anthropological Institute, London. Fortes' Mss. are in the Africa Studies Centre, Cambridge University. Finally, I thank M. Fortes and R. Steel for supplying me with unpublished materials collected by them, and most especially for the data collected by the Ashanti Social Survey in the 1940s.

² I am preparing a paper on the ‘history’ of Africanist history. I have thus far been able to locate historiographical writings on the ‘Ibadan’ historians of Nigeria and on the construction of history in East and southern Africa, but nothing has yet come to light on the ‘construction’ of history in Ghana in the 1950s and 1960s.

³ Hart, K., ‘The social anthropology of West Africa’, Annual Review of Anthropology, xiv (1985), 243–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 257.

⁴ The relevant articles are listed in the bibliography to the Preamble (p. liv) in the reprint under review here. Of particular interest in the present context is Wilks, I., ‘What manner of persons were these? Some reflections on Asante officialdom’, in Schildkrout, E. (ed.), The Golden Stool: Studies of the Asante Center and Periphery, Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, lxv, i (New York, 1987), 109–30.Google Scholar

⁵ M. Johnson, ‘The population of Asante, 1917–1921: a reconsideration’, and Wilks, I., ‘The population of Asante, 1817–1921: a rejoinder’, in Asantesem, xiii (1978), 22–8 and 28–35Google Scholar respectively.

⁶ As evidence of his Marxist credentials Wilks cites [Preamble, xx] E. Terray's review of the original publication of his book in Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, xxxii (1977), 311–25.Google Scholar Terray is a fine scholar, but he himself writes from an avowedly Marxist perspective, and his conclusion that Wilks's book is ‘a work of historical materialism in the Marxist tradition’ [P, xx] is wholly to be expected. Wilks then undermines his position by mentioning a further review [p, xx] by J. Depelchin – another Marxist scholar – who found Wilks's book to be Weberian and insufficiently attentive to Marxist categories of analysis. I have read as many reviews of the first publication of Wilks's book as I could readily locate, and I still await the finding of any reviewer other than Terray who saw ANC as a work in the (any) Marxist tradition.

⁷ Some of the other problems with ANC are dealt with in my forthcoming Asante: State and Society in African History.

⁸ See Wilks, I., ‘Aspects of bureaucratization in Ashanti in the nineteenth century’, J. Afr. Hist., vii (1966), 215–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Ibid., ‘Ashanti government’, in D. Forde and Kaberry, P. (eds.), West African Kingdoms in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1967), 206–38.Google Scholar The alleged ‘Kwadwoan revolution’ was a curiously null topic of debate, and it remained largely unchallenged for years. For one dissenting voice – but one that accepts rather than challenges many of Wilks's basic premises – see Hagan, G., ‘Ashanti bureaucracy: a study of the growth of centralized administration in Ashanti from the time of Osei Tutu to the time of Osei Tutu Kwamina Esibe Bonsu’, Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, xii (1971), 43–62.Google Scholar One area that urgently needs investigation and review is the reliability of the highly formulaic stool histories collected under the auspices of the IAS, Legon in the early 1960s and used by Wilks as a cornerstone of his deliberations on the ‘Kwadwoan revolution’ (and other matters).

⁹ The quotations are from, respectively, ‘Aspects’, 216; ‘Ashanti government’, 207; and Political Bi-Polarity in Nineteenth Century Asante, Ninth M. J. Herskovits Memorial Lecture, Edinburgh University, 1970, iGoogle Scholar; and ANC, 468.

¹⁰ See, for example, Arhin, K., ‘The Asante praise poems: the ideology of patrimonialism’, Paideuma, xxxii (1986), 163–97.Google Scholar Yarak's book is especially good on disentangling Wilks's ‘peculiar use’ (p. 22) of Weber, and it is a valiant effort to sort out precisely what Wilks had and had not read of Weber's oeuvre over the years.

¹¹ Peel, J. D. Y., ‘History, culture and the comparative method: a West African puzzle’, in Holy, L. (ed.), Comparative Anthropology (Oxford, 1987), 88–118Google Scholar (the passage quoted is at p. 108). I should here like to thank John Peel for many conversations that have borne on the matters at hand in this review.

¹² There is a large literature on logical positivism. Ayer's views are set out simply in Priest, S., The British Empiricists (London, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. An amusing but difficult treatment of logical positivism and language is to be found in Baker, G. P. and Hacker, P. M. S., Language, Sense and Nonsense (Oxford, 1984)Google Scholar. Logical positivism's surviving adherents are now (almost all) confined to British and (a few) American universities. It is now a philosophical backwater, and – in its English incarnation – it was always insular and insulated from philosophical developments in Europe and the U.S.A. For a criticism of verification by a historian of ideas, see Berlin, I., ‘Verification’, in Parkinson, G. H. R. (ed.), The Theory of Meaning (Oxford, 1976), 15–34.Google Scholar