Review of Dar es Salaam, ed. R. Brennan, A. Burton, and Y. Lawi

These insightful essays on Tanzanian social history are the latest addition to a growing collection of such edited volumes, and it is this august company that makes this book, despite its colorful subject matter, a little dull. Meant as a corrective to the classical interest in the big events of history, social history easily becomes facile substitute rather than critical complement. But such is not the case here; this material shows changes and linkages across the decades demonstrating social history’s power to belie the claims of political leaders and conquering states to control the destinies of nations. Despite their success in this regard, many of the essays have an unfinished quality to them emphasized by occasional lapses in copyediting. This trait is also common to such volumes, since they tend to be built on initial soundings rather than final statements. These shortcomings are inherent to the form, and need not mar the book’s purpose for historians of modern Tanzania. The