Ndubueze L. Mbah's Emergent Masculinities: Gendered Power and Social Change in the Biafran Atlantic Age offers theoretical sophistication, rich textual analysis, and extensive empirical research. Focused on Ohafia, a matrilineal Igbo society where women exercised greater political power than men until the mid-nineteenth century, Emergent Masculinities sustains a comparative analysis of gender and power across Igbo communities, as well as coastal communities that directly engaged European traders. Mbah uses multiple spatial lenses to underline the heterogeneity of Igbo communities and highlight transatlantic commerce's differential impacts at the coast and in the interior. Considering history's multiple spatial scales, Mbah locates this section of eastern Nigeria in a larger circum-Atlantic world, which shared a material culture expressed in housing, dress, and entertainment, among other practices.

Mbah offers several critical interventions in the historiography of slavery and gender in Africa. He successfully historicizes and grounds transformations in gender ideology and practice in Ohafia during the era of the transatlantic slave trade and through to the early decades of colonial rule. He convincingly demonstrates that, as Ohafia became more deeply engaged in the Atlantic economy, men's predominance in the military gave them access to new avenues of wealth, which in turn provided them with the means to access different kinds of status markers. While hegemonic adult masculinity (ufiem) used to be marked by the display of the head of an enemy killed in combat, new items such as guns, kerosene lamps, and zinc roofs became symbolic stand-ins for an enemy's head and the new currency of wealth and power. Culturally and linguistically, Ohafia recognized and sanctioned new levels of inequality when wealth associated with transatlantic commerce (ogaranya) surpassed ufiem as the highest level of masculinity. As men gained access to new avenues of wealth, they were able to translate it into increasing political power. Mbah's analysis of these shifting patterns illustrates the dynamic nature of Igbo gender ideology and practice before the imposition of colonial rule. Colonial gender principles were not imposed on a blank slate. Rather, colonial gender ideals had to make room in a variegated gender landscape.

Mbah uses a variety of sources to substantiate his claims. He uses life histories to augment data obtained from oral testimonies, missionary records, colonial reports, and studies by an early generation of anthropologists. For example, through the life stories of Kalu Umaoma, an enslaved man who served as a warrant chief under the British, and Unyang Uka and Otuwe Agwu, two wealthy Ohafia women, he demonstrates the ways in which Igbo cultures separated biology and gender. Umaoma, Uka, and Agwu each performed ogaranya masculinity by building modern houses, acquiring enslaved people, and marrying wives, albeit to different ends. Umaoma relied on the labor of wives, concubines, and slaves as well as his positions in the colonial government and the Church of Scotland Mission to secure his freedom and status, while Uka and Agwu used their wealth to solidify their matrilineages under a colonial state that privileged male power and patrilineal ideology.

Emergent Masculinities is rich local history that is in dialogue with Atlantic history, specifically Jamaican history. Mbah combines the diaries of ship captains, slave owners, and the Slave Voyages database with the classic and recent secondary literature on Jamaica to portray a deep understanding of Jamaica's slave society. Jamaica allows him to demonstrate how the circulation of goods, people, and ideas linked different corners of the Atlantic world and to highlight how changes in one contributed to changes in the other. Ohafia's accumulation of Atlantic commodities inspired increasingly violent raids that produced even more captives for the Atlantic market. In the second half of the eighteenth century, significant numbers of enslaved Igbo women and children arrived in Jamaica, thus directly linking the histories of slavery, Jamaica, and the Bight of Biafra. Mbah's analysis pushes beyond the circulation of people and commodities to show that women were at the center of both regions’ slave systems. While enslavement in the Bight of Biafra did not create a distinct, racialized social stratum, slavery in both regions relied heavily on male ownership of and control over women's reproductive and productive labor.

Emergent Masculinities is both interdisciplinary and transnational. It illustrates the author's facility with anthropological debates, gender theory, and literary theory, along with Atlantic and Caribbean history. Given its breath, this book should be read by scholars on both sides of the Atlantic as one model for integrating Africa into Atlantic history. Similarly, it demonstrates how we can put Africa and the diaspora in historical and theoretical conversation. At the same time, Mbah's spotlight on the direct linkage between Jamaica and the Bight of Biafra needs a fuller discussion in the conclusion. He shows that comparative analyses of the hegemonic masculinities that emerge in Jamaica and the Bight of Biafra might be a very productive line of research. In addition, he points to the need for more research on the resilience or traces of Igbo culture in Jamaican society. Finally, scholars of gender will find great value in this text, for Mbah demonstrates the centrality of gender to the social, economic, and political institutions that emerged in the wake of the migration of people and commodities around the Atlantic. All the qualities that recommend Emergent Masculinities will make it challenging for both undergraduate and graduate students who are not familiar with African history. Nonetheless, the reader's efforts will be rewarded because Mbah has crafted a thoughtful and engrossing study.