Had the first prime minister of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo lived, he might have led the Congolese people to a unified and prosperous nation post-independence. But Patrice Lumumba’s aspirations were cut short by his brutal assassination in late 1960, just months after Congo gained independence from Belgian rule. His death and the enduring impact of it on the Congo’s trajectory are the focus of Reid’s compelling The Lumumba Plot , which exposesthe many egregious errors and sinister efforts of the cia to eliminate Lumumba.

Williams’ White Malice: The cia and the Covert Recolonization of Africa is a crusading examination of what the cia did in Africa in the 1960s, and it suggests that the cia , working closely with Congo army chief Joseph Mobutu and coordinating with secessionist leaders in Katanga, was responsible for Patrice Lumumba’s assassination. Recently uncovered hard evidence from cia files reveals the Agency’s connivings in, with, and against Africa and Africans during the first years of independence, involving cia station heads, accomplices, the many shady characters tasked with nasty deeds against African leaders, and those many miscreants who supplied information and surveillance about African political and industrial personalities. The book is a reminder of our misconceptions, our failures to read Africa well, our willingness to let ends dictate means, and a testament to blinkered policy making.

Fitzmaurice’s King Leopold’s Ghostwriter is a fascinating Dickensian tale of law and extreme hubris upending one of Oxford, the law, and Queen Victoria’s own—Sir Travers Twiss. His failed attempt to conceal that he had married a prostitute ultimately led him to an ill-advised, and self-contradictory, endorsement of Belgian King Leopold II’s establishment of the Congo Free State. Indeed, Twiss’ every professional accomplishment is now subject to a severe re-assessment in the light of his willingness to do Leopold’s dirty work and thus place millions of Congolese in serious harm’s way. More Congolese would have lived, and Africa might have remained less scrambled if Twiss had not married a prostitute and been exposed as a fabulous mountebank.

Utopianism, wild optimism, and a spreading conviction that the many ills of the world could be remedied with just the right formulas punctuated the final decades of the Victorian era. Given the absence of outright global conflicts and pandemics, the seeming triumph of industrialism, the conquest and occupation by Europe of remote areas of the globe, and a communications revolution that knit distant regions more easily to mother countries, leading figures of the period thought that they could confidently succeed in making the planet a much better and much more humanly rewarding enterprise.

Because charisma is a social phenomenon, not an individual trait, its analytical utility in assessing and evaluating the quality and character of political leadership remains questionable. Cultural differences influence the traits and attributes that are internalized by one set of followers and not others. At the nation-state level, political leaders do arise who mesmerize their constituents charismatically, but too frequently that appeal is episodic, transient, and easily forfeited. Most of all, successful political leadership is more than behaving charismatically; delivering results in the form of economic growth, educational advances, health and medical services, and national self-respect are more important and more lasting. David Bell brings all of those considerations to the fore in a remarkable book that analyzes the charismatic appeals of Washington, Napoleon, Louverture, Paoli, and Bolivar, and raises important questions about the force of charisma in history.

South Africa’s Jameson Raid ultimately betrayed African rights by transferring power to white Afrikaner nationalists after helping to precipitate the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902). The Raid also removed Cecil Rhodes from the premiership of the Cape Colony; strengthened Afrikaner control of the South African Republic (the Transvaal) and its world-supplying gold mines; and motivated the Afrikaner-controlled consolidation of segregation in the Union of South Africa, and thence apartheid. Perceptively, Charles van Onselen’s The Cowboy Capitalist links what happened on the goldfields of South Africa to earlier labor unrest in Idaho’s silver mines. Americans helped to originate the Raid and all of the events in its wake.

“Genocide” provides a useful optic with which to understand and examine purposeful purges of Mesopotamian, Alexandrine, Visogothic, Norman, Mongol, and Spanish (during the Inquisition) people, and those of more modern times. Raphaël Lemkin’s cross-disciplinary arguments, developed in the crucible of an unfolding Holocaust and trimmed and refined at the United Nations, offer new insights into the actions of rulers and ruling classes, into the elimination or forcible assimilation of all manner of groups, and into the kinds of decisions that dominant populations made throughout recorded time to brand, and then discriminate against and persecute, weaker or minority groups.

Despite its main title, Mungiu-Pippidi’s The Quest for Good Governance is primarily about the conceptualization, measurement, and reduction of corruption throughout history. Its wealth of provocative heuristic ideas is invaluable for contemporary social science. For readers of this journal, across several disciplines, the book offers an admirable re-thinking of many received notions that have influenced our understanding of how American, European, Asian, and African governments have coped with the realities of corruption, and how corruption continues to distort their various national and/or developmental trajectories.

What exactly is fame? Is it synonymous with renown, with historical importance, or with historical significance? Do importance and significance have the same meaning in this context? Are the most famous women and men—the “big names”—of past times the persons who contributed the most to propelling or stemming the tides of history? Does being merely remembered matter more or less than accomplishing something that made a difference to the pace of human progress? What is the value of quantifying recognition versus qualifying the value added of a particular individual action or bundle of actions? All of these questions, and more, arise from Skiena and Ward’s novel, bold attempt to compare thousands of human endeavors across time and geography in Who’s Bigger? Where Historical Figures Really Rank. It works, in a sense, but does it improve understanding?

After numerous unremarkable centuries, why did humans start to live longer and reproduce themselves in increasing numbers? What were the proximate causes of this remarkable demographic acceleration? No longer destined everywhere to endure brutish and short life experiences, why did humans, first in northwestern Europe and eventually everywhere else, begin almost abruptly to enjoy enhanced well-being? Did their food intakes become more nutritious and their conflicts less devastating? Or were improvements in potable water sources key factors? Conceivably, too, the world simply grew richer, and its citizens could purchase better lives more easily. Deaton's The Great Escape provides many answers to such questions, and an excellent entry for historians and social scientists into the literature on well-being over time.

Historians at one time emphasized the critical causal interventions of important individuals, ascribing decisive differences in outcomes across time and place to human agency and idiosyncratic initiative. Subsequently, structure, contingency, and a collection of nonidiosyncratic choices became more prominent in causal explanations. Culture, geography, climate, economic circumstance, ideology, etc., became the favored variables in attempts to answer significant questions about key turning points in the global past. In Why Nations Fail , however, Acemoglu and Robinson demonstrate that leadership and governance matter much more than we thought. Although structural analyses add powerfully to our research, it is the quality of leadership that often determines whether a state is to flourish politically or economically.

Charisma is a social phenomenon, not an individual trait, but using the concept loosely (as we all do) as a catch-all description for magnetism, fame, heroism, or celebrity is both misleading and confusing; all of these terms are analytically distinct from charisma as well as from each other. Loose usage obscures the significance of the interactions between genuinely charismatic men or women—usually political and organizational leaders and gifted mobilizers rather than movie stars and athletic giants—and their believers and followers. Adulation is not necessarily indicative of charisma, nor is popular appeal. Charismatic leaders and their devotees together move barriers and overcome obstacles in order to achieve transformative goals. Charisma is best understood as the inspirational component of the bond between leaders and their followers that allows them to act as if they are genuinely moved to maximize what they presume, or are led to believe, are their own interests.

Biography is history, depends on history, and strengthens and enriches history. In turn, all history is biography. History could hardly exist without biographical insights—without the texture of human endeavor that emanates from a full appreciation of human motivation, the real or perceived constraints on human action, and exogenous influences on human behavior. Social forces are important, but they act on and through individuals. Structural and cultural variables are important, but individuals pull the levers of structure and act within or against cultural norms. The success of historical biography as a craft ultimately turns on the nature of its evidence and the interdisciplinary methodologies that it can bring to bear on its subject.

Emanuel Swedenborg, an engineer and mystic of the Enlightenment, prophesied that mankind's spiritual perfection was to be found deep in the heart of Africa. That idea unleashed a flurry of scientific and geographical inquiry among his disciples and other Swedes that has long been neglected. In addition to stimulating an era of romantic colonization in Africa, some of the activity and enthusiasm of the Swedenborgians contributed significantly to the abolitionist agitation that eventually ended the slave trade.

Texts and consciousness are important, and require analysis in a variety of different modern African historical settings. It is also wise, and critical, to unmask obscurantist rhetoric, and to reevaluate received, politically correct, accounts. Subjecting the nationalist period to that kind of heightened commentary is essential. But re-ordering the past so as to unmask the distortions of despotsand otherabusers of their own truths is also necessary. Fully discovering who killed Herbert Chitepo, and thus who gave rise to the despotic regime of Robert Mugabe, would be an earnest of that endeavor.

The twentieth century saw its share of autocrats and tyrants. The question of how to understand each group, as well as the differences between them, is certainly a fit subject for the interdisciplinary study of history. Hard evidence from psychology and biology stand ready to make a valuable contribution to it. Yet, at this juncture, political and sociological explanations for the bizarre behavior of ruthless leaders have more to offer than taxonomical imperatives derived from anecdotal data about personality traits of rulers and sociobiological speculations based on the impulses of dominant male primates.