Scholarship on the West African kingdom of Asante is at the leading edge of Africanist research. In this book, T. C. McCaskie gives a detailed and richly nuanced historical portrait of pre-colonial Asante. His delineation of state and society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is centred on an extended analysis of the crucial ritual of the annual Kumase odwira festival. It is at once a profound historical reconstruction of an African polity,...