This important volume is the first up-to-date analytical study of Portuguese decolonization in any language. It deals with all the Portuguese territories in Africa (especially Angola, and Mozambique, but also Guinè-Bissau, Cabo Verde, S. Tomè and Principè, but it is equally concerned with metropolitan Portugal itself, given the exceptionally intimate interdependence of developments at home and abroad. It also considers the wide ranging consequences of the collapse of the empire on other white regimes in Africa and for the system of regulating international relations. Because of its complexity and the ideological passions it has aroused (historiographically as well as politically) this is a study that could only be written at some historical distance form the events it describes. Dr MacQueen has done it justice in a book that will be of compelling interest to anyone interested with the history of modern Africa, of Portugal and the modernization of Southern Europe and the end of European empires.