mandate (p. 192). Van Melkebeke notes a similar increase in material welfare among plantation workers in the colonial Kivu district, who were able to spend growing amounts of their wages on consumer goods like clothes, bikes, and sewing machines

plantation workers in the colonial Kivu district, who were able to spend growing amounts of their wages on consumer goods like clothes, bikes, and sewing machines (pp. 210, 241). Such stories seem to conflict with messages about compulsion and declining real wages and therefore merit more attention than they currently receive. Such concerns notwithstanding, Van Melkebeke has produced an original and rigorous analysis of two contiguous but differently organised coffee economies in central Africa. The book is mainly a social history, offering readers many detailed insights into the complexities of wage, corvée, and tributary labour in two African societies under Belgian colonial rule. For economic and agricultural historians, the main takeaways relate to the book’s fundamental distinction between the settler economy that emerged west of Lake Kivu and the economy of independent smallholders on the eastern side of the lake. The book shoots off warnings about poorly paid plantation work and reminds the reader of the economic advantages of smallholding. But instead of viewing these two different production systems in opposition to one another, as scholars often do, Van Melkebeke has created a picture of historical interconnectedness, perhaps unique to the Lake Kivu region, where workers sought plantation labour to redeem themselves from obligations to powerful chiefs or to become independent smallholders themselves.