This collection of seventeen essays, like most collections, is uneven and sometimes unsatisfactory, but it merits more than a routine notice because at several points it touches on the most important problem in modern African history. Most of the essays, it is true, do not. Among the connections between capitalism and demography which the book treats, the most popular with contributors is migration, which is described in Senegal, Burkina, Niger, French Equatorial Africa, Zaire, Malawi, Zambia, Angola, and South Africa (with reference to Johannesburg's population history). Although several of these essays are useful (that on the Ovimbundu especially raises interesting questions), they cover a wellworked subject which is important but not critical to Africa's demographic history. The same might be said of Myron Echenberg's essay on the population estimates made by the French military in West Africa. Patrick Manning's attempt to simulate the impact of the Atlantic slave trade on different regions of West Africa touches on more central issues. Martin Klein argues for a slave mode of production in the Western Soudan during the late nineteenth century, while Abdullahi Mahadi and J. E. Inikori contribute a provocative suggestion that the general underpopulation of West Africa so limited the market as to prevent the growth of capitalism even in the region's most developed area around Kano, although I suspect that this neglects the fact that the sheer size of the market was no guarantee of capitalist production, as the histories of India and China suggest.' Yet these chapters are not what makes the book important. It is important because it is the first collective attack on what might be called the natalist interpretation of African history. Natalism as the editors (who do not use the word) explain in their excellent introduction sees Africa in the framework of demographic transition theory. It argues that precolonial African societies had very high fertility rates because they were needed to counteract equally high mortality rates caused by disease, famine, violence, and isolation. Even so, precolonial Africa remained severely underpopulated. With the coming of European medicine, peace, and famine relief, mortality declined while fertility at first remained high. The result was the accelerating population growth which perhaps first became apparent on a continental scale between the wars and is likely to dominate African history for several generations to come. The next stage of demographic transition the decline of fertility is as yet apparent south of the Sahara only in Zimbabwe, Botswana, and South Africa.2 Natalism, then, sees the roots of Africa's present population problem in the high fertility of precolonial societies and the positive