Reviewed by:

• The Gun in Central Africa: A History of Technology and Politics by Giacomo Macola
• Brice Cossart

Written by Giacomo Macola, a specialist of African history, this book studies precolonial African societies’ political, social, and cultural relationship with the exogenous technology of firearms. This publication has been well received in the field of African studies as an important contribution to understanding the complex political landscape of the central savannah, a broad region spreading between current-day Angola, Zambia, DR Congo, and Malawi. Macola focuses on the long nineteenth century, a period which another specialist of African history, Richard Reid, has identified as the African military revolution in his book, Warfare in African History (2012). This timeframe corresponds to the rather late involvement of the central savannah region in the gun-slave cycle, due to the penetration of long-distance trading networks expanding from Portuguese Angola on the [End Page 968] Atlantic coast and from Arab-Swahili Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean. The book asserts the crucial role of imported firearms in profoundly reshaping the geopolitics of central Africa until the first decades of European colonial rule in the early twentieth century.

Beyond the circles of Africanists, this research more broadly addresses historians of technology as the introduction highlights their general and undeserved neglect of Africa. Macola’s approach is inspired by the constructivist perspectives of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and recent cross-cultural consumption studies. He therefore opposes technological determinism and emphasizes user agency through the concept of domestication. Drawing on a wide range of mainly European sources, Macola provides case studies showing how firearms were adopted in different ways by different societies according to pre-existing contexts. Among the Lozi, the centralized structures of the monarchy enabled their king to make the imported gunpowder technology a royal monopoly and use firearms as royal symbols and political tools to generate or strengthen patronage bonds. In the scattered communities of Luvale hunters, firearms circulated more widely among common men and became a symbol of masculinity. In the Kaonde society, firearms were also used as currency for transactions. Through the example of the oppressive Yeke state which massively imported guns in exchange for slaves, Macola shows that firearms alone were not enough to secure the violent rule of warlords, as this state collapsed when rebels managed to cut supply flows from Portuguese Angola. The case of Ngoni warriors who consistently refused to fight with firearms highlights processes of technological rejection motivated by socio-cultural norms; missile weapons did not fit into the Ngoni system of values based on honor and bravery. Nevertheless, under colonial rule, firearms became a positive symbol of social promotion among the Ngoni after many of them were incorporated in the police force.

In other words, Macola succeeds in showing historians of technology that nineteenth-century central Africa is a very interesting laboratory for studying the cross-cultural appropriation of technology. For readers not well-acquainted with this geographical space, the book proves to be very pedagogical and provides many maps as well as a full chapter of contextualization. Despite little technical information on firearms, Macola’s research is, in my opinion, relevant to historians of military technology. It forces a broadening of the military revolution debate in terms of chronology, spatiality, and interdisciplinarity. Even in recent studies reassessing Parker’s thesis of the “Rise of the West” (The Military Revolution, 1988), sub-Saharan Africa retains an image of “primitive warfare” left by the Zulu (cousins of the Ngoni) fighting with spears against British rifles in the late nineteenth century, for example J. C. Sharman in Empires of the Weak (2019). In contrast, Macola’s book shows how most African precolonial societies, even those far from the coastal areas under early European influence, [End Page 969] became familiar with gunpowder technology. They developed their own techniques to use, repair and improve firearms and even, in some societies, to produce gunpowder and ammunition. The book’s emphasis on the multifaceted political, social, economic, and cultural dimensions of firearms underlines the necessity to seek interpretations about the circulation...

审核人：

• 贾科莫·马科拉（Giacomo Macola）撰写的《中非之枪：技术与政治史》
• 布莱斯·科萨特（Brice Cossart）

本书由非洲历史专家贾科莫·马科拉（Giacomo Macola）撰写，研究了殖民前非洲社会与外在枪支技术的政治，社会和文化关系。该出版物在非洲研究领域广受好评，为理解中央大草原的复杂政治景观做出了重要贡献，该大草原分布于当今的安哥拉，赞比亚，刚果民主共和国和马拉维之间。Macola专注于十九世纪的漫长时期，在这一时期，另一位非洲历史专家理查德·里德（Richard Reid）在他的《非洲历史战争》一书中将其确定为非洲军事革命。（2012）。此时间范围对应于中部热带大草原地区在枪支奴隶制周期中的介入较晚，这是由于从[安第968页]大西洋沿岸的葡萄牙安哥拉和墨西哥的阿拉伯斯瓦希里语桑给巴尔扩展了长途贸易网络的渗透印度洋。这本书断言了进口枪支在深刻改变中非地缘政治直到二十世纪初欧洲殖民统治的前几十年中的关键作用。

除引言之外，这项研究还更广泛地针对技术史学家，因为导言突出了他们对非洲的普遍和不应有的忽视。Macola的方法受到科学技术研究（STS）和最近的跨文化消费研究的建构主义观点的启发。因此，他反对技术决定论，并通过驯化的概念强调用户代理。Macola借鉴了广泛的主要欧洲来源，提供了案例研究，显示了不同社会如何根据先前的情况以不同方式采用了枪支。在Lozi中 君主制的中央集权结构使他们的国王使进口的火药技术成为王室的垄断者，并使用枪支作为王室的象征和政治工具来产生或加强赞助关系。在卢瓦尔猎人分散的社区中，枪支在普通人中更为广泛地传播，并成为男子气概的象征。在Kaonde社会，枪支也被用作交易的货币。通过以压迫性的Yeke州为例，该州大量进口枪支来换取奴隶，Macola表明，仅枪支还不足以确保军阀的暴力统治，因为当叛军设法减少葡萄牙安哥拉的供应量时，该州崩溃了。一直拒绝与枪支作战的Ngoni战士案件突显了由社会文化规范推动的技术排斥过程；导弹武器不适合基于荣誉和勇气的Ngoni价值体系。然而，在殖民统治下，枪支成为许多人加入警队后的积极象征。

换句话说，Macola成功地向技术史学家展示了19世纪的中部非洲是研究技术的跨文化应用的非常有趣的实验室。对于不熟悉该地理空间的读者来说，该书被证明具有很好的教学意义，并提供了许多地图以及完整的情境化章节。在我看来，尽管有关枪支的技术信息很少，但Macola的研究与军事技术的历史学家有关。从时间顺序，空间性和跨学科性方面，它迫使军事革命辩论的范围扩大。即使在最近的研究中，也重新评估了帕克关于“西方崛起”的论文（《军事革命》，1988年），撒哈拉以南的非洲地区保留了祖鲁人（努戈尼的堂兄弟）在19世纪后期与矛头对付英国步枪作战时留下的“原始战争”形象，例如《弱帝国》中的JC沙曼（2019年） 。相反，Macola的书显示了大多数非洲前殖民社会，即使是那些在欧洲早期影响下远离沿海地区的社会，也都[End Page 969]如何熟悉火药技术。他们开发了自己的技术来使用，修理和改进枪支，甚至在某些社会中还生产火药和弹药。该书强调枪支的多方面政治，社会，经济和文化影响，突显了对枪支流通进行解释的必要性。