Much writing about 19th-century East Africa has been distorted by the legacy of post-Enlightenment thought as well as by more insidious racist ideologies. Humanitarian lobbies throughout Western Europe, strongly influenced by positivist ideas, and campaigning to highlight the ravages of the slave trade, condemned Africa in their writings and propaganda to the periphery, outside "universal" history. Africa was reduced to a continent of slavery, in which the market, entrepreneurship and free wage labour could not exist. These ideas penetrated scholarly works and still survive in some guises....