This bibliography presents a list of topics that helps the reader to understand the impact of white rule on African health and welfare. By 1905 most of Africa had been subjected to European rule. Many Africans suffered greatly in the First World War and in the world depression of the 1930s. Some of the topics described in the bibliography include: the imperial mind, aspects of economic history, Christianity, Islam and French Black Africa. The structure and personnel of British government in Africa before 1914 have been vividly portrayed by Gann and Duignan. Government records are of exceptional importance for a period in which governments played so large a part in the cash economy. Recent concern to integrate economic and political history has been specially fruitful in the study of African labour, and has also begun to relate this to agricultural history. Evidence relating to the activity of expatriate Christian missionaries in Africa is extensive, well-preserved and accessible.

This chapter summarises the economic changes that took place in Africa. Half a century or more of active 'legitimate' commerce had pre-adapted the peoples of West Africa in varying degrees to the twentieth-century type of exchange economy. Gold production in South Africa represented over half of the world output in the 1920s, though it declined to about a third in the next decade. In East Africa, moreover, European artisans and small traders were confronted by unbeatable Asian competitors. The forced cultivation of cotton by peasant farmers in German East Africa was the trigger for the great Maji Maji revolt at the beginning of post-war period. Extension of the market had greatly enhanced the value of the marginal product of Africa's land and labour, but physical productivity had hardly altered. The ox-drawn plough had been widely adopted by African farmers in South Africa, but elsewhere they had rarely found it feasible or profitable.