Caree A. Banton's More Auspicious Shores: Barbadian Migration to Liberia, Blackness, and the Making of an African Republic is a fascinating and beautifully written account of nineteenth century Afro-Barbadian migration to Liberia. Anchored to the 1865 journey of 346 Afro-Barbadians to Liberia on board the Brig Cora, (which was likely a repurposed slave ship), the book surveys the themes of Caribbean emancipation, the Middle Passage, and African liberation (151).

More Auspicious Shores offers much to African, Caribbean, and African diaspora history, and makes a major intervention in the study of Black migration to Liberia, in which scholars have explored this theme from African American perspectives while saying little about Afro-Barbadians. As the bulk of Afro-Barbadian migration to Liberia occurred on that one trip in 1865, this was perhaps to be expected. Significantly, the study goes far beyond asserting that ‘Barbadians were in Liberia, too’. Rather, its value is that it both reveals what we lose by obscuring the diversity of Black migration to Liberia and demonstrates what we stand to gain by engaging Liberia within the diasporic world of Afro-Barbadians.

Banton details this community's postabolition experiences, showing how they imagined living lives of freedom beyond Barbados while enduring continued subjugation in slavery's aftermath. Banton shows how Afro-Barbadians, influenced by British imperial public propaganda about the mission of ‘civilizing Africa’, fashioned themselves as critical role players in building Afro-European relationships as both British colonial subjects and ‘children of Africa’.

Afro-Barbadians were encouraged to choose Liberia (as opposed to say, Sierra Leone) as a destination by African American pioneers who had formed the emerging nation in 1847 with the controversial support of the American Colonization Society (ACS). The book describes how Barbadians carried their political and cultural experiences in the Americas — ‘Middle Passage baggage’ — with them to Liberia. While there, they faced challenges of Blackness, class, ethnicity, labor, and citizenship that set them apart from both Americo-Liberians and indigenous Liberians. Banton's story is bookended by Arthur Barclay's complicated ascendency to the presidency of Liberia in 1904, which Banton reads as a political triumph for this community. Barclay was the first president of Liberia to not be African American; his ethnicity was challenged by detractors during his election campaign. Barclay was four years old when he and his family arrived on the Brig Cora and settled in Crozierville; his father died within a year and he was raised by his mother, Sarah Barclay, amidst Europe's scramble for Africa and the questions it raised about Black imperialism and indigeneity — if Barbadians saw themselves as being part of the British Empire, were they also complicit in the government's exploitation of Africa? And what did this mean for their potential for leadership in ‘free’ Liberia?

Banton demonstrates how Black repatriation to Africa was a response to both slavery and emancipation across the Caribbean. Indeed, this study is perhaps as much about Barbados as it is Liberia. Banton writes, ‘The Barbadian experience has been subject to a fragmented discussion in both Caribbean post-emancipation and Liberian colonization narratives that is routinely dismissed as insignificant’ (11). But this Afro-Barbadian group migrated to Liberia some thirty years after the abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean; this speaks volumes about how the contentious process of emancipation in the West Indies did not equal ‘freedom’ for the formerly enslaved. More Auspicious Shores links return movements to Africa to Black insurgent mobilities and practices of resistance to slavery — like maroonage within Barbados, as well as enslaved peoples’ attempts to escape to Haiti. From the perspective of Barbados, Banton offers varying genealogies and rerouted discourses of diaspora, nationalism, and African redemption.

Banton suggests that by hinging themselves to this troubling hub of ‘Afro-European relationships’, Afro-Barbadians mapped a somewhat contradictory vision of pan-Africanism. The study details how Afro-Barbadians sometimes carried white supremacist discourses with them to Africa, asserting that the diasporic activities of this group

Banton scathingly draws on the words of Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born to explain this phenomenon, suggesting that this class sought to ‘live above all the Blackness in the big old slave castle’ (19).

This quote speaks both to the brilliant writing and the methodological scope of More Auspicious Shores. Each paragraph reflects a deep analysis of primary sources, such as the passenger log of the Brig Cora; US, Caribbean, and African newspapers; British, Barbadian, and Liberian government documents; materials of the Barbados Company for Liberia; and speeches of migration advocates. The volume required extensive research across Barbados, Liberia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Yet just as much as the book is driven by archives traditionally used by historians, it is theoretically rich in its framings about how we should think about the African diaspora.

Offering a critique of gender, color, and class, Banton shows how the leadership of emigration organizations in Barbados were all-male and middle-class (161). Readers might want to know more about the Liberian experiences of Afro-Barbadian women and how grassroots Barbadians thought about emigration to Africa. What might all of this have looked like if the drivers of emigration to Liberia were not all middle-class Black men, but grassroots Black women? While these questions may be beyond the book's scope, it is hard not to think about the radical possibilities of the past after reading such a magisterial, engaging, and thought-provoking history.