Tippu Tip

This carefully researched but highly readable study, fills a significant gap in the literature on Africa during the early colonial period, both because of Tippu Tip’s historical importance, and because we still tend to see the immense changes of those years mainly through the eyes of European colonisers and explorers. This book is a rare and valuable exception.

Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa

In a work of meticulous scholarship but also rich in anecdote, Mr Laing, uses his extensive first-hand knowledge of the Arab world and its culture to open up not just the exotic world and travels of a legendary Arab trader in East Africa, but to explore from an original angle and with new insight the politics and practicalities of the European ‘Scramble’ for the Dark Continent in the second half of the 19th century, and the work of explorers there.

Simon Heffer, writer and political commentator

With this new life setting Tippu Tip, the Arab trader in ivory and slaves, in his wider context, Stuart Laing gives us the seamy underside of the Scramble for Eastern Africa. It was as much an Arab, Indian, and indeed African, scramble, based on the island market of ‘Stinkibar’, as European. White explorers, soldiers, and officials were the foam on the top of this multicultural tide.

John Lonsdale, Emeritus Professor of Modern African History, University of Cambridge

The most comprehensively documented ivory trader in the history of 19th-century Africa, Tippu Tip is brought to life with almost tactile immediacy in Stuart Laing’s elegant and unobtrusively meticulous biography. An exceptional portrait of an exceptional man.

Alexander Maitland, author of Speke and the Discovery of the Source of the Nile, and Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer

Stuart Laing had his first career in the British diplomatic service, specialising in Arab affairs. After working in Saudi Arabia (twice) and Egypt, he was Ambassador in Oman and then in Kuwait.

Since 2008 he has been Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where – in between his duties to the College and the University – he has researched and written on British–Omani history, and the abolition of slavery in East Africa and the Indian Ocean.