Book excerpt: Cosmopolitan Africa, 1700-1875, offers an alternative interpretation of the 175 years leading up to the formal colonization of Africa by Europeans. In this brief and affordable text, author and series editor Trevor R. Getz demonstrates how Africans pursued lives, constructed social settings, forged trading links, and imagined worlds that were sophisticated, flexible, and well adapted to the increasingly global and fast-paced interactions of this period. Getz's interpretation of a "cosmopolitan Africa" is based on careful reading of Africans' oral histories and traditions, written documents, and images of or from the eighteenth century. Examining this time period from both social and cultural perspectives, Cosmopolitan Africa, 1700-1875, helps students to re-envision African societies in the time before colonization.