The Nuer conquest entailed a fourfold increase in territorial domain achieved during the short span of seventy years (ca. 1820—90). This represents one of the most prominent and widely discussed instances of tribal imperialism contained in the ethnographic record. Professor Kelly’s comprehensive examination of the causes and means of Nuer expansion caps nearly a half century of scholarly inquiry that encompasses a capsule history of anthropological approaches to a central theoretical issue: the interrelationship between social and material causes in historical and developmental processes. This book will be of interest to anthropologists concerned with social theory, economic anthropology, ecological anthropology, social organization, and warfare.

Raymond C. Kelly is professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan. He held a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in 1979-80, was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1982-83, and held a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982-83. He is the author of the landmark book Etoro Social Structure: A Study in Structural Contradiction, published in 1977 by the University of Michigan Press.