This book explores life in Africa in the colonial era, showing how people navigated the boundaries between the spaces of the colonial world. This book was first published as a special issue of The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth Studies.

Introduction: Biographies Between Spheres of Empire 1. The English Interpreters in Dahomey, 1843-1852 2. David Meetom: Interpreting, Power and the Risks of Intermediation in the Initial Phase of German Colonial Rule in Cameroon 3. Transcending Gender Roles, Crossing Racial and Political Boundaries: Agnes Hill's Fight for her Inheritance in German Southwest Africa 4. The Awkward Squad: Arts Graduates from British Tropical Africa Before 1940 5. 'No One Knows What He is Until He is Told': Audience and Personhood in a Colonial African Diary

Achim von Oppen is Professor of African History at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. He has published widely on the history of social and economic change; space-making and translocality; religious change; and 'development', mainly in rural settings in Zambia and Tanzania.

Silke Strickrodt is a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of African Studies and Anthropology, University of Birmingham, UK. Her research focuses on the history of pre-colonial and early colonial West Africa, particularly on Afro-European encounters in the context of trade, Christian mission and scientific exploration.