This study has been in my mind since I paid a first visit to Sierra Leone and Liberia in 1969, and was struck by the possibilities which they offered for political comparison. I should like to thank the Department of Government at Manchester for making that visit possible, the Department of Politics at Lancaster for giving me leave of absence for a longer visit in 1973, and the Social Science Research Council, London, for meeting travelling expenses for both. I have benefited greatly from discussions with colleagues and friends at both Manchester and Lancaster, at Fourah Bay College in Freetown, at the University of Liberia in Monrovia, and at Cuttington College, Gbarnga, Liberia; seminar discussions at Oxford, London, Edinburgh, and the University of the West Indies, Jamaica, have also been most helpful. Dennis Austin, Bill Tordoff, Caroline Tutton, and CUP's anonymous reader made very useful comments on the draft.

I greatly appreciate the amount of help which I received from many Liberians and Sierra Leoneans: Ministers, Representatives, Paramount Chiefs, government officials, village schoolmasters, journalists and many more. I can remember none who were not friendly and courteous, and few who did not go out of their way to provide me with information and enlightenment. I should also like to record my debt to that neglected band of scholars, the writers of unpublished theses, and in particular to Walter Barrows for his work on Kenema, Victor Minikin for that on Kono, and Martin Lowenkopf for that on Liberian central politics; these and other obligations are more fully recorded in the notes. Finally, I wish to thank Lyn Hunter for typing successive drafts of the manuscript.