Tom McCaskie was successively Professor of Asante History, Birmingham University, and Professor of African History, SOAS, London University, until his retirement in 2011. He is author of State and Society in Pre-Colonial Asante (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995) and Asante Identities (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2000). In 2015, fifty of his selected papers were reprinted as Asante, Kingdom of Gold by Carolina Academic Press. This paper is the tenth he has published on Asante since 2017. He lives in France.