Admire Mseba. Society, Power, and Land in Northeastern Zimbabwe, ca. 1560–1960. Ohio University Press, 2024. Maps. Figures. 224 pp. $34.95. Paperback. ISBN: 9780821425893.

Admire Mseba's Society, Power, and Land in Northeastern Zimbabwe provides a compelling and deeply researched analysis of the long-term entanglements of land, power, and social hierarchy in the region.Spanning four centuries, the book demonstrates that contemporary land inequalities cannot be explained solely by the advent of colonial rule.Rather, they emerge from a longue durée interplay of precolonial political configurations, colonial rearticulations of authority, and postcolonial contests over legitimacy and ownership.The breadth of Mseba's source base is one of the major strengths of the work.Archaeological materials, especially the Nyanga terraces, illuminate early agricultural specialization and the emergence of hierarchies grounded in control over fertile land.Linguistic evidence-particularly the Shona lexicon associated with soils, cultivation, and lineage-functions as a "living archive," revealing enduring conceptualizations of land and authority.Oral traditions and colonial archival records, including the Land Apportionment Act and the Native Land Husbandry Act, allow the author to trace the shifting uses of "tradition" in struggles over land access and political legitimacy.The result is an interdisciplinary historiography that surpasses narrow colonial frameworks and restores African agency across centuries.Chapter One argues that since the earliest agricultural communities in the region, inhabitants possessed sophisticated and differentiated understandings of land use.By the eighth century, intensive cultivation practices had already generated inequalities, with land becoming a marker of status as well as subsistence.Mseba contends that precolonial elites derived their authority from the management of agricultural technologies and the capacity to secure advantageous terrain-an early foundation for enduring social stratification.In Chapter Two, Mseba examines dynastic traditions from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries and demonstrates how elites crafted origin myths to legitimize land concentration.Claims to foreign ancestry or to links with major kingdoms such as Rozvi or Mutapa were mobilized to justify local authority.Importantly, the author illustrates that political plurality long characterized the region and that colonialism entered an already complex landscape.Rather than representing an abrupt break, the nineteenth century appears as a period of layered political assemblages, intensifying competition over land and authority.Chapter Three explores the period between the collapse of the Rozvi Kingdom (c.1834) and the consolidation of British rule (c.1890).Population movements,