Harvey Amani Whitfield's new study hinges upon the issue of black community formation in the Anglophone Atlantic world. How, he asks, “did ex-slaves from vastly different backgrounds become a distinct group of African British North Americans after the War of 1812” (2)? To answer this question, Whitfield examines one particular Atlantic community—Nova Scotia—in its postrevolutionary context. Moving beyond previous studies of loyalists, Whitfield suggests that a variety of geopolitical events after the American Revolution shaped the emergence of a new black identity in British Canada. He asserts that the War of 1812, conflicts with the Maroons in the British West Indies, Anglo-American colonization efforts, British Emancipation in 1838, and the continued enslavement of blacks in the American South had a decisive impact on how black refugees viewed themselves and their role in the Atlantic world.

While the loyalist experience frequently has been illustrated in more binary terms—as the escape from slavery to the promise of freedom—Whitfield's study offers a more nuanced view. Nova Scotia, he suggests, was neither the land of freedom nor the stark contrast to American slavery that we once assumed. Beginning his narrative in the early 1700s, Whitfield describes the slave society in Ile Royale and the importation of African slaves into Nova Scotia. He contends that the province's “ties to the Atlantic world's reliance on black slavery created conditions and attitudes that greatly influenced” attitudes toward black loyalists and black refugees (10). Not only did new white settlers import slaves but the Nova Scotia government actually offered New England planters larger land grants if they brought bondsmen with them. Moreover, Halifax was a trading hub in the British imperial world by the 1750s—it exported staves, fish, and shingles to the West Indies in exchange for slaves, molasses, and rum. Thus, Whitfield asserts, the free society to which black loyalists thought they were fleeing after the Revolution was in reality populated with slaves and poverty-stricken free blacks. In most cases, white settlers and government officials believed that blacks profited from enslavement and were unfit for freedom. While Whitfield does not adequately explain how or why slavery was abolished in Nova Scotia at the turn of the century, his point about prevailing tensions among white loyalists, imperial officials, and black refugees gives a more accurate picture of how freedom was qualified, or even denied, to black settlers who arrived in Nova Scotia.

Whitfield argues that the rapid influx of black refugees from different areas in the Anglophone Atlantic created a “fragmented black community in Nova Scotia” by the first decades of the nineteenth century (23). Black loyalists and the slaves of white loyalists arrived in British Canada during the American Revolution. In 1796, the British government sent nearly five hundred Jamaican maroons to Halifax in an effort to quell unrest between planters and the maroons. Not long after, however, most of these maroons left Canada for Sierra Leone. And during the War of 1812, thousands of American slaves fled to British ranks for protection before later settling near Halifax. But, as Whitfield points out, the black refugee community was as affected by those blacks who came to Nova Scotia as it was by those who left it. In the early nineteenth century, many refugees abandoned their farms and settlements and struck out for Haiti or Liberia at the behest of American colonization societies or the Haitian government. Some even returned to American soil. Yet it was those refugees who chose to remain in Nova Scotia, Whitfield suggests, who became the pioneers of an independent free black society in Nova Scotia.

Even in the midst of such rapid changes in the Nova Scotia population, there were several shared experiences that undergirded the development of a distinct black refugee community. Despite the fact that black refugees were from different slave societies, whether the Chesapeake or the Georgia Sea Islands, where “different ideas about labor, language, and culture” persisted, the “escape from slavery” provided them with a common reference point (25). To be sure, the journey from enslavement to freedom “reified the differences between the Refugee's American past and their British future” (36). But though recent black emigrants to the province initially united around their first encounters with freedom, they subsequently bandied around those obstacles to liberty facing them upon their arrival. In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, the black refugees’ encounters with racial hostility, misleading government policy, poor employment prospects, and arduous farming techniques created “the foundations for a new culture and community in British North America” (46).

Yet Whitfield makes a more compelling case for the development of the black refugees’ political consciousness as subjects of the British Empire rather than as an independent community of farmers and domestics in Nova Scotia. By the 1830s, their identity “revolved around assertions of loyalty to Britain and British institutions” (84). In other words, the Nova Scotia blacks did not seek to build their own independent community so much as they sought inclusion within the British Imperial world. To assert themselves as British subjects, they pledged loyalty through celebrations of Queen Victoria's coronation and annual commemorations of Emancipation Day. Public displays of loyalty to British abolitionism and to the British monarchy encouraged the refugees’ shared consciousness of themselves as British subjects. Thus, as Whitfield demonstrates, it was not blacks’ own emancipation from slavery that offered them inclusion within the British imperial community but, rather, their celebration of the supremacy of British freedom and the British monarchy in the Atlantic world.

Whitfield offers a new look at the complex and often disjunctive process of black community formation in the postrevolutionary period. Still, his central claim that the black refugees became a “distinct group of African British North Americans” remains unconvincing (2). Before characterizing Nova Scotia blacks as an independent African community, Whitfield might first consider how these blacks characterized themselves. Although Whitfield's primary goal seems to be to portray an organic process of self-fashioning in Nova Scotia, the black selves he seeks to describe remain conspicuously absent from the text. If “identity” is Whitfield's mode of analysis, then he should interrogate it as the more protean category that it was in the early nineteenth century. Indeed, as the African Diaspora expanded throughout the 1800s, African-ness became less and less relevant to contemporaries. Most often, black people fashioned their identities through inclusion in the Atlantic commercial system and by reifying abolitionist goals. In fact, blacks living in Canada, the United States, and the West Indies actively asserted themselves as British subjects or as Americans, but very seldom as independent Africans.