Books, Arts & Manners: Out of Africa

The Fall of the Asante Empire: The Hundred-Year War for Africa’s Gold Coast, by Robert B. Edgerton (Free Press, 293 pp., $23)

ASANTE, more usually Ashanti, is little more than a footnote in British imperial history, remembered by a few as the country where Sir Garnet Wolseley made his reputation, and as the name of a curious green candy once popular with Scottish children, the “Ashanti plum.” Fewer still could identify it with modern Ghana.