Cameroon's Tycoon: Max Esser's Expedition and Its Consequences. (Book Reviews: Anthropology & History)

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CHILVER, E.M. & UTE ROSCHENTHALER. Cameroon's tycoon: Max Esser's expedition and its consequences. xx, 204 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2001. [pounds sterling]17.00 (paper) (Book Reviews: Anthropology & History)

Colonial history, biography, social geography, travel writing, historical ethnography, family album, anthropology of cross-cultural encounters: this book leaves no genre unexplored in its drive to reassess the nature of the relationship that bound one man -- and through him a hesitant empire -- to the Cameroon Grassfields. While anthropological orthodoxies have tended to cast colonial administrations in the same hackneyed role over recent decades, Chilver and Roschenthaler's inspired examination of the personal, economic, and …