been Faroqhi’s main interlocutors while producing this volume. While her im- mersion in the Mughal historiography is impressive, and her reading has obvi- ously been nothing short of voracious, at times it also seems to have been somewhat indiscriminate. Obviously, the ideal comparative historian is one who knows both (or perhaps all) sides of the comparison equally well, rather than having an asymmetric immersion in the different bodies of material. To that extent, this book will certainly be open to specialist criticism. Nevertheless, one must salute the courage of a senior scholar who is still willing to don stout boots and tramp the strange roads of an unfamiliar historiographical landscape in search of new ideas and disconcerting arguments. Sanjay Subrahmanyam Department of History, UCLA E-mail: subrahma@history.ucla.edu doi:10.1093/jis/etaa047 Published online 28 November 2020 The Krio of West Africa: Islam, Culture, Creolization, and Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century By GIBRIL R. COLE (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2013), xv þ 272 pp., notes, bibliography, index. Price PB £21.99. EAN 978–0821420478. A dominant Eurocentric but erroneous characterization of Sierra Leone (SL) was of a colony of a largely Europeanized and Christianized African ethnic group; a group which served as an agent of European mission civilisatrice and beacon of Christian light in ‘Dark Africa’. Obviously sidestepped in most of the existing narratives is the multiplicity of the ethnic and social constituents of descendants of former slaves and Liberated Africans from the slave ships that were bound for the New World settled in the SL Peninsula in 1788. G. R. Cole has tried to correct this anomaly, among others, in this book. According to him, some 200 different languages by different groups were spoken in the colony by 1850 (p. 53). The introduction (pp. 1–23) gives a bird’s eye view of the post-slave trade SL community. Chapter 1 (pp. 25–60) discusses what the term Krio/Creo(lization) signifies in the context of the nineteenth century, that is, the process by which the multi-ethnic and multilingual community was able to accommodate all ethnic- ities from within and outside the colony. Chapter 2 (pp. 61–107) is on Islam, Christianity, and the State in colonial SL. It discusses how the Church and the colonial establishment actively collaborated to entrench a homogeneous society with fealty to the Cross at the expense of Islam and indigenous belief systems. Chapter 3 (pp. 108–31) examines trade and religion in the colonial period, spe- cifically the role that was played by the Muslims in promoting commerce be- tween the SL colony and hinterland societies. It also highlights how literate Muslims in Arabic, English, and the local tongues, became ‘indispensable’ (pp. 111) to the State bureaucracy. The Krio Diaspora in Nigeria, otherwise called the ‘Saro Community’ in Yorubaland is the subject matter of Chapter 4 (pp. 132–46). How and why Rev. James Johnson (1836–1917) promoted the BOOK REVIEWS 135 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jis/article/32/1/135/6008788 by guest on 04 January 2021