Postscript

Abstract

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the British image of Africa in the early nineteenth century was its variance from the African reality, as we now understand it. There was also a marked lack of the kind of “progress” one might expect to find in a body of ideas that was constantly enlarged by accretions of new data. This is especially hard to explain, given the fact that nineteenth-century social scientists were trying to be methodical, working to a standard that was conceived as rational investigation.