A holistic understanding of Atlantic slavery requires scholars to comprehend the vastly different types of slaveries that constituted it. While recognising the centrality of rural plantation captivity in the making of the Atlantic World, the editors of The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade compellingly argue for the importance of cities in shaping the lives of African-descended peoples who rapidly built the Black Atlantic world in the era of plantation slavery. The volume thus explores the textured ‘world of forced cosmopolitanism and desperate cultural adaptation’ (p. 6) through 12 case studies based in urban settings across Europe, Africa, the Portuguese and Spanish mainland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic, focusing especially on the eighteenth century. As the introduction posits, the ‘relative liberty of the city’ (p. 6) afforded opportunities for independence and mobility for African captives and their descendants that troubled the attempted hegemony of early modern European domination.

The volume is divided into four parts with a total of twelve chapters. Part I explores the complex emergence of African identities in three spaces of the urban Black Atlantic: Freetown, Sierra Leone, Ouidah in present-day Benin, and Bahia, Brazil. David Northrup's essay examines the identity formation of liberated Africans in nineteenth-century Freetown through the dual process of creolisation, with the adoption of English-language, Christian and Western schooling practices, and Africanisation, or the ‘awareness’ of distinct African ethnic ‘nations’ produced in the aftermath of the Middle Passage. Robin Law's chapter documents the making of Ouidah as a multi-ethnic, pluralistic major port city with heterogeneous European, African and American (especially Brazilian) populations. Crossing the Atlantic, João José Reis's essay reveals how ethnic identity shaped the work, religious and social lives of enslaved and free peoples of African descent in the majority-black port of Salvador da Bahia, where captives were able to carve out relative autonomy in comparison to their plantation-bound counterparts.

Part II turns to the making of black life in three central Caribbean port cities under different imperial regimes. Looking beyond questions of religion and rebellion, Matt Childs's chapter examines the critical social and financial roles played by cabildos de nación (black religious brotherhoods rooted in Spanish ecclesiastical and West and Central African sodalities) in eighteenth-century Havana, Cuba. David Geggus's essay explores the challenges and opportunities faced by free people of colour and enslaved captives in the little-studied, majority-slave port of Cap Français, the largest town of eighteenth-century French Saint-Domingue. Centring his study on eighteenth-century Kingston, Jamaica, Trevor Burnard offers a window into the process of becoming a Kingston slave, in addition to a detailed analysis of slaveholding in the foremost slave port of the British Atlantic.

Part III on ‘Urban Spaces and Black Autonomy’ features four essays that explore how Africans and their descendants in the Black Atlantic crafted urban landscapes and lives that trespassed the boundaries imposed by racial slavery. Jane Landers's chapter maps the emergence of an ‘African landscape’ in seventeenth-century Cartagena, the product of close relations between urban slaves and palenques, or maroon communities established in the nearby hinterlands that were long reviled by Spanish colonial authorities. Turning to the experiences of enslaved pilots in the British Americas, Kevin Dawson makes a persuasive case for the exceptional power exercised by enslaved boatmen in the history of the urban Atlantic world, where they were able to employ unimaginable degrees of autonomy and turn seemingly impenetrable racial hierarchies upside down. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Luanda, Angola, is the focus of Roquinaldo Ferreira's essay, which outlines the dynamic labour, spiritual, and cultural worlds of Luanda slaves, some of whom remarkably travelled back and forth from Brazil. Mariza de Carvalho Soares's chapter examines how the African-born barbeiros (barbers or bloodletters) of Rio de Janeiro continued to occupy an important place in Brazilian society even into the nineteenth century when they were otherwise in decline in the British, French or Portuguese empires.

Finally, Part IV turns to black life and sociality in two non-plantation societies: early modern Lisbon and Mexico City. In his essay on the previously untold history of ‘African Lisbon’, James Sweet deftly challenges the historical amnesia that has violently erased the history of black slavery and community making in eighteenth-century Portugal. As Sweet reveals, African-descended captives and free blacks in Lisbon created powerful urban neighbourhoods like Mocambo that served the physical, spiritual and communal needs of its residents. An important point of contrast to the other essays in this volume, Nicole von Germeten's chapter shows how African-descended confraternities in eighteenth-century Mexico asserted American or creole identities rather than African-based places of origin, a difference that spoke to the specific realities of Afro-Mexican life in early modern New Spain.

The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade provides scholars with a fruitful opportunity to compare and contrast the impact of distinct imperial systems in the shaping of urban black life across space and time. Indeed, as the essays illustrate, while the urban setting created similar opportunities for autonomy across the Atlantic World, black life was ultimately shaped by the cultural confines of the regime in power. Moreover, as the editors assert in the introduction, such an exploration of urban slavery can help scholars further understand the complexity of rural slavery since ‘urban institutions maintained connections to enslaved people in the countryside, serving as crucial sites for the development and transmission of syncretic cultural traditions’ (p. 18). By illuminating the dynamic world of the urban Black Atlantic, this volume will undoubtedly set the agenda for future scholarship on urban slavery and black life in the African diaspora and Atlantic World.