572 Book Reviews © 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Henry Bernstein and Terence J. Byres. Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 7 No. 4, October 2007, pp. 563–576. The crisis of 1919–21, which ended in de-monetization (replacement of 5 franc French coins with British alloy and paper) and the cancellation of the rice debt at the expense of government, illustrates the interconnections between migration, credit and climate at the core of the book. It also permits a brief examination of the role of colonial government, as analyzed by Swindell and Jeng. The 1918 –19 trading season, coming hard on the heels of disruptions created by war and the influenza epidemic, was marked by a failure of millet and rice, but a good harvest of groundnuts at high prices on the world market. The government advanced rice to producers to ensure that strange farmers would come the next year despite the failure of food crops. The following year saw record imports of rice, a record groundnut harvest and continued high prices, leading to optimism and a willingness to extend credit on the next harvest. When prices collapsed in 1921, the government had not recovered its advances from 1919 and merchants were unable to collect their debts. Gambian chiefs and farmers responded to the price drop with a trade boycott or tong as they had on several occasions in the past. In the credit crisis that followed the government cancelled rice debts and decided that a recall of circulating French coins, overvalued locally after French devaluation, was the only way out. Unlike their French counterparts in Senegal, British officials did not create an institutional response to provide seed and food on credit (the cooperatives or société de prévoyance ), but intervened periodically in response to events beginning in the 1890s, advancing seed or rice to provide cheaper credit to producers on at least five occasions. These crises were often followed by discussions of what could be done to avoid subsistence crises that affected the flow of migrant labour and the harvest. Attitudes ranged back and forth between disdain for African cultivators and confidence in European expertise and periods when the complexity of Gambian farmers’ strategies were discovered and then forgotten. But nothing much came of plans for ploughs and irrigation, although the possibilities of irrigation were studied by various experts with experience in other parts of the empire. No funds were forthcoming and experiments were very small in scale. The British regime in the Gambia reaffirms a taste for imperialism on the cheap and trade without investment. Migrants, Credit and Climate is an excellent study that deserves to be widely read by historians and social scientists interested in the transition from the slave trade to colonial rule, African farming systems, the chains of merchant credit that shaped colonial trade in West Africa, and the interconnections between migration, credit and climate in the Gambia. It is based on detailed data from archives, plus field observations and some interviews. The authors are to be congratulated on their excellent synthesis of research on the Gambian groundnut trade over 100 years. GIUSEPPE CARUSO Shining Path: Guerrilla War in Peru’s Northern Highlands, 1980–1997, by Lewis Taylor. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006. Pp. 232. £50 (hb); £18.50 (pb). ISBN 1846310040 and 1846310164 In the 1980s and 1990s, Peru experienced for almost 20 years one of the bloodiest civil wars in contemporary South American history. During that period, the Peruvian state contended legitimacy and rule with the insurgent Partido Comunista del Peru-Sendero Giuseppe Caruso, Development Studies Department, School of Oriental and African Studies, Thornhaugh St, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG. e-mail: gc14@soas.ac.uk