In 1911, Mojola Agbebi, the director of the Niger Delta Mission in Nigeria, addressed an international audience gathered on the fourth day of the Universal Races Conference held at the University of London. His talk, entitled, “The West African Problem,” used W. E. B. Du Bois’ formulation in The Souls of Black Folk of “the problem of the twentieth century” in order to explore how the color line affected Africans and Europeans differently. Agbebi shared American and British social reformers’ critiques of the new colonial social order in Nigeria, and specifically of its roots in racist conceptions. Rather than advocate for an end to European colonial rule, Agbebi focused on changing British attitudes about Africans, which he believed would, in turn, inform colonial policy.

Thomas E. Smith's Emancipation without Equality: Pan-African Activism and the Global Color Line traces the evolution of Pan-African activists’ ideas beginning with the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, at which European powers established colonial borders as well as “fair treatment of colonized peoples,” through the First Universal Races Congress held at the University of London in 1911. To this end, Smith's history follows well-known black American Pan-Africanists, such as Du Bois, George Washington Williams, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, as they used transnational reform networks to call attention to “biological essentialist” thinking at the root of European colonial policies and racial violence in the United States (3).

While offering original insights into the relationship between conferences on race and colonialism and formal organizations, such as the American Negro Academy, Smith uses a “holistic approach” which eschews dichotomies such as “cultural” or “political” Pan-Africanism in order to show the interconnected nature of, for example, “the culturally rooted creativity” expressed by the Jubilee Singers during their world tour, and John Bruce's articles exposing Christian missionaries as participants in erecting a global color line (21). Through this holistic approach, Smith argues that these activists’ ideas reflect a progressive rather than a radical approach to Pan-Africanism, which in some instances called for the use of violence to end European colonialism. If Europeans and Americans were educated to value the cultural practices and traditions of indigenous Africans, then they would be less inclined to create oppressive social policies en route to extracting valuable resources, like rubber or diamonds, for imperial coffers. At least, that is what these progressive Pan-Africanists hoped.

Unlike studies that ignore black women internationalists, such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett or Anna Julia Cooper, Emancipation without Equality establishes the centrality of black women to Pan-Africanist thinking during this era. Wells-Barnett's anti-lynching tour of England, for example, is used to offer readers a window into how Pan-Africanists continued to use abolitionist-era networks in the United Kingdom in the post-emancipation era. By doing this, Smith illustrates a sense of continuity rather than disjuncture between the two major social movements of the nineteenth century (118).

Smith marshals an impressive array of printed primary sources gleaned from conference proceedings alongside letters and newspaper articles to chart this history. His analysis of these documents draws upon cultural studies, diaspora studies, and postcolonial studies. Through nuanced interdisciplinary reading, Smith shows how Pan-African activists crossed not only physical borders but intellectual ones as well. Not only is the book written in a manner that moves through these diverse intellectual histories with eloquence, it also identifies the contribution of Pan-African intellectuals who have not received much attention as internationalists, including John Bruce. Bruce, along with Pauline Hopkins, as Smith points out, published ethnographies, histories, and poetry in newspapers and pamphlets, while presenting papers at international human rights conferences to offer an African-descended perspective on European colonialism and American racism. In this sense, these Pan-African activists’ very presence at these international conferences in Europe and America challenged popular views about black inferiority.

While Emancipation without Equality explores an international group of Pan-African activists, the majority of those who receive treatment in the book are black Americans who spent little time living abroad. Alexander Crummell is perhaps the one exception, but how his experiences or essays shaped the ideas of Du Bois and Anna Julia Cooper, for example, is not always clear. Similarly, the book offers a critical examination of Edward Blyden's ideas on Islam and the exploitative nature of Christian missions in West Africa, but it does not discuss how Blyden's ideas shaped those of other Pan-Africanists, such as John Bruce.

It would seem appropriate, given the book's emphasis on the continuity between abolitionists and Pan-Africanists, that it would provide more space to those black American abolitionists and emigrationists who left the United States and settled in the Caribbean or Africa. For example, James Holly, who left for Haiti in the 1850s, devoted the rest of his life to the struggle against the global color line. Examining Holly's ideas from the 1850s until the turn of the century, for example, would provide readers with a better sense of the socioeconomic conditions on Caribbean islands in contrast to those in the United States. Likewise, George Washington Williams's letters written during his mission to the Congo offer an on-the-ground perspective about the consequences of European colonialism, under the guise of “civilization,” that would complement the critique expressed by white intellectuals and activists like Henry Richard Fox Bourne—whose ideas receive more attention than Williams's (78–80).

Emancipation without Equality offers nonspecialists a clearly written overview of black American internationalism and Pan-African thinking decades before the Pan-African Congresses in the Post–World War I era. In addition, it provides scholars who focus on black American activism before and after the Progressive Era with valuable analysis of themes and topics, such as masculinity, biological essentialism, and imperialism, as expressed in the writings of Pan-Africanists. Emancipation without Equality, then, is an impressive achievement that provides an original interpretation of Pan-African activism during the Progressive Era.