Historians used to envy anthropologists. Their discipline seemed more rigorous than our own, but also simpler. Anthropologists, we imagined, studied a single community in a single place at a single time. Often, they seemed to study societies that were ‘timeless’ in the sense that they did not, apparently, change. 

Judith Scheele is an anthropologist, but her book on the Sahara is anything but simple. For one thing, it is not about a single community in a single place. The Sahara is a vast area that encompasses many different peoples. None of the groups studied here are static. On the contrary, many of them – nomads, herders, conquering soldiers, smugglers, migrants – are on the move. 

This is a remorselessly unromantic work that will disabuse those whose views of the Sahara owe something to Beau Geste or the travelogues of Michael Palin. Scheele begins by reminding us that the land there is largely brown and flat rather than made up of golden sands and spectacular dunes.