Excavations at the Zimbabwe (enclosure) of Manekweni, in southern coastal Mozambique, have shown that it belongs to the Zimbabwe Culture which was centred on the Rhodesian plateau. Occupation levels have been dated to between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries. The faunal evidence indicates that a section of the population benefited from intensive beef production through transhumant pastoralism on the seasonally-fluctuating fringes of tsetse fly infestation. The settlement pattern of Rhodesian Zimbabwe suggests that their siting was determined by the demands of a similar system of transhumance. This model provides a basis from which to begin to reconstruct some aspects of the economies of early Zimbabwe. It is already clear that Zimbabwe were not simply the products of long-distance trade; rather, their economies integrated farming and cattle-herding as well as gold production and foreign trade.

On admet en général que l'expansion de l'islam était une des principales préoccupations des géographes arabes quand ils décrivaient la situation dans les régions excentriques par rapport au monde musulman. En partant de ce présupposé on aurait pu s'attendre à trouver pour l'ètude de l'histoire d'une région précise, telle que le Kānem, des renseignements amples et explicites nous permettant de dessiner un tableau satisfaisant de la progression de l'islam, au moins dans ses grands traits. En fait, chemin faisant, on découvre que les renseignements qui nous ont été transmis dans ce type de sources, même sur un sujet aussi important, sont si lacunaires et contradictoires que presque rien ne peut être dit avec certitude du processus global dans lequel s’inscrit l'islamisation de la région. Or, dans le cas du Kānem une source interne, longtemps négligée, peut contrebalancer et corriger la vision non seulement lacunaire mais aussi déformant que les géographes arabes donnent du Kānem ancien, le Diwān salātin Bornū. Composée dans l'entourage du roi, cette source elle-même ne présente pas une vue neutre, et, surtout en ce qui concerne des questions touchant à l'islam, elle doit être maniée avec circonspection; mais contrairement aux aperçus aléatoires et sans rapport les uns avec les autres fournis par les géographes arabes, les chroniqueurs autochtones nous présentent une vision d'ensemble rigoureusement chronologique de l'histoire du Kānem dont la critique, à certains égards, est plus aisée.

The recent Curtin–Inikori debate has revealed a basic shortcoming in the historiography of the eighteenth-century French slave trade. In computing the size of the French trade, historians have too long relied either on questionable estimates published by eighteenth-century authors or on published material about one port, Nantes. Enough material exists in various French archives to produce a more accurate appraisal of at least one aspect of the trade. An analysis of captains' reports and other documents shows that French exports from Africa were somewhat greater than Curtin believed, and that Curtin's errors resulted from limitations imposed by the published data. At the same time, it is almost impossible to know how many slaves were imported into the French West Indies during the eighteenth century, as an illegal British trade accounted for a significant percentage of the slaves delivered to the French colonies.

When the first anti-slavery legislation was enacted for Angola in 1836, Brazilian planters began to experiment with coffee growing in Africa. They had some success during periods of high coffee prices in the 1850s, 1870s and 1890s, when a couple of dozen estates in the Cazengo district produced slave-grown coffee. Far from being abolished, slavery, in minimally modified forms, survived into the early twentieth century. Traditional slave traders were reluctant to invest in local slave crops and most preferred to supply the slave demands of Säo Tome. In Angola a rival peasant sector also evolved in the coffee business. Black smallholders responded with greater alacrity to opening crop markets than did plantations, and much conflict arose over the sequestration of peasant plots by credit-holding shop-keepers. Although the entire nineteenth-century coffee crop from Angola never amounted to a significant share of the international market, the pattern of land and labour exploitation adopted was revived in the mid-twentieth century when the colony became the world's fourth largest coffee producer. In the coffee slump of the 1890s Cazengo planters diversified into sugar cane which later also became a significant part of the modern agro-industry of Angola.

Ivory appears to have gone to the Cameroun coast in considerable quantity in the early nineteenth century, while little was being carried across the desert. By the middle of the century this position had been reversed. This paper traces the penetration of Hausa ivory traders to Adamawa and the southern ivory markets, and the subsequent struggle by European firms with posts on the Niger and the Benue to divert the trade back to the sea-borne route. Eventually the Germans in Kamerun had some success in diverting what had become a dwindling trade as the elephants fell victim to modern weapons and to the ‘opening up’ of the country.

This study of the performance of the Niger Company, from surrender of the charter until its acquisition by Lever Brothers Limited, explores the ways in which the corporation organized both for stability and for change. Pooling agreements, contracts, negotiations with colonial governments and shippers aimed at defending the company's monopoly over river communications won before 1900. At the same time, company agents expanded the geographical area and the range of commercial operations into a wide variety of enterprises. Of these, the development of mining on the Bauchi Plateau and participation in the exploitation of northern Nigerian groundnuts were the most important and placed severe strains on the capacity of the firm's personnel, as well as on its working capital. The outbreak of war precipitated a crisis in the export of produce which was temporarily deferred by the exceptional profitability of raw commodities and tin concentrates. By 1919, the need for skilled personnel and greater amounts of capital compounded the difficulties arising from too great a reliance on river transport. The company assisted with railway construction and used the new system to meet commitments in its relationship with the mining companies; but it did not decide to restructure its operations in Nigeria to keep pace with changes brought about by railway communications, particularly at Lagos and Port Harcourt. The study, therefore, draws attention to the importance of technological adaptation in business performance, particularly in the case of an enterprise with a number of generalized functions in a rapidly changing tropical market.

French administrative policies during the inter-war period in Central Cameroun created a class of indigenous chiefs who fulfilled crucial functions in the mobilization of manpower and resources from the rural areas for the development of the European sector of the economy. Early problems in organizing food markets to provision the growing non-agricultural sector resulted in a decision to channel agricultural growth through the chiefs rather than to leave it to market forces. The institution of a food requisition system involved the administration in exercising direct control over key aspects of the rural economy through the regulation of production, price control, control of the trading network, and the use of the indigénat to support the rights of chiefs over their subjects. The system succeeded in achieving two purposes at once: it guaranteed a cheap, reliable supply of food to the wage-earning population, thus allowing wages to remain low and stable; and it encouraged the development of a class of wealthy planters in the rural areas whose self-interest lay in support for the colonial administration. However, close control of the economy became impossible in the late 1930s, and the government's dissatisfaction with some of the implications of its own chieftaincy policy resulted in the abandonment of the whole inter-war system. The rural economy which gradually emerged after 1946 was characterized by family-based production units but lacked a well-developed institutional framework appropriate to it.