These fourteen essays showcase the two recent methodological insights that have transformed the study of modern slavery in the Americas, and in so doing make a valuable contribution to Routledge's impressive Rewriting Histories series. First, the collection positions slaves as resourceful agents in fashioning their societies. Slaves petitioned kings and popes to abolish slavery; they turned rumour into forms of political pressure and action; they adapted Catholicism, sacred oaths, and Islam to structure and enrich their communities and methods of resistance; they pursued highly skilled and well-informed strategies of marronage, rebellion, and escape. Second, the black Atlantic is treated as a complex unit characterized by the intricate and incessant circulation of knowledge, news, skills, capital, rumour, and bodies around the Atlantic littoral. Individual essays discuss how slaves who were veterans of tactically and technologically sophisticated wars in Africa in the eighteenth century played important roles in the revolution which transformed French St. Domingue into the Haiti of the black Jacobins; how “maritime maronnage” spread news, rumour, and runaway slaves around the black Atlantic in ways that frustrated colonial control; and how the American Revolution exported both starvation and the powerful current of Enlightenment radicalism to the Jamaican slave insurrection of 1776. Collectively, these localized and specific historical accounts brilliantly demonstrate how the multiple identities and political formations in the early incarnation of the black Atlantic – whether slave, free, colonial, maroon, African, European, or especially American – were highly interconnected, dynamic, and prone to rapid and sometimes revolutionary change.

Temporally, the collection begins in 1684, as Richard Gray examines the petition presented to Pope Innocent XI by a representative of the Brazilian Christian slave elite, Lourenço da Silva de Mendouça, which successfully prompted the Catholic Church to condemn many of the practices of the Atlantic slave trade. It ends with Rebecca J. Scott's microhistory of the meanings of “freedom” in late nineteenth-century Cuba, which examines how slave emancipation and anticolonial insurgency helped define this term within one valley near Cienfuegos, and particularly how that definition unfolded in an illustrative ownership dispute over a mule. Scholars of North America will admire Ira Berlin's famous piece on Atlantic creoles, which explores how the charter generation of Africans in the North American colonies was not – as has often been thought – cowed, vulnerable, and deracinated, but rather comprising men and women skilled in the linguistic and cultural currency of the littoral who flourished prior to the ascendancy of plantation production. Similarly engaging are essays by Emily Clark and Virginia Meacham Gould on the significance of black women on the Catholic congregations of New Orleans, and Steven Hahn's piece on how Christmastime rumours of impending land reform in the US South of 1865 became a “field and form of political struggle” for newly emancipated African Americans (335).

Nine of the essays, however, choose the Caribbean islands as their focus, and many respond to Paul Gilroy's anticipation in The Black Atlantic that any intellectual field developing from his formulation would have Haiti at its centre. The collection triangulates Haiti as a major hub of commerce and rebellion, simultaneously a wellspring of the black Atlantic's colonial revenue and the source of its most transformational ideas and revolutionaries. This is timely: the Haitian earthquake crisis has prompted much paternalistic media scrutiny of the island's problems, but less interest in connecting those problems to the history of how slaves defied European colonial plantocracies, and this book brilliantly reminds us how thoroughly the contemporary Atlantic world was shaped by this history. An extraordinarily rich and skilfully assembled collection, and one well suited to classroom use, this represents a valuable contribution to an increasingly sophisticated field.