At the start of this excellent book tracing intertwined constructions of white North American and black tropical spaces in the settler colonial imagination, Ikuko Asaka provides a note on the many terms used to distinguish its black historical actors: African Americans, black Canadians, African North Americans, free blacks, self-emancipated people. This reflects the author's precision in clarifying complex (and shifting) socio-legal and geographical identities of people of African descent in North America in the age of emancipation, but it speaks also to the transnational scope of a work that carries us deftly from the colonial and metropolitan fallout of the American Revolution to the Civil War and Reconstruction, from formerly enslaved blacks eking out new lives in southern Ontario to Deep South sharecroppers entrenched in debt peonage, via numerous white-led (and invariably unsuccessful) colonization schemes directed at relocating blacks from the “free soil” of North America to Africa, the Caribbean, even Central America. Tropical Freedom demonstrates how – despite contrasting formal relations to bondage between the slaving republic of the United States and the “free” monarchical province of British Canada – conceptual hierarchies of race, labor, and climate emerged that transcended national boundaries. White settlers and statesmen across borders and waters cultivated and naturalized a powerful discourse that emancipated black people belonged in tropical environs, and tropical environs only; and thus, equally, “that black freedom was a deviant condition in the entirety of the North American continent” (166).

African North Americans (to borrow imperfectly from Asaka's terminology) contested the rhetoric of climatic–racial essentialism through their words, deeds, and movements. While, as chapter 2 shows, blacks in Canada and those in the US North offered “different iterations of freedom and identity” – reflecting the particular dynamics of refugee freedom in the post-emancipation British Empire versus the promise of republican freedom in the slave-based United States – they together recognized the profound threat that ideas of an exclusively white “settlerhood” posed to their short- and long-term hopes to establish homes in North America (78). Black advocates in Canada and US-based abolitionists cited black settlements in Nova Scotia and other decidedly nontropical climes as living proof of what former slave Henry Bibb's Canadian periodical Voice of the Fugitive hailed in 1850 as “a noble-hearted, proud-spirited, agricultural [black] people,” who aided the vital settler project of “improving the country” (118). Anglo-Americans resisted such evidence, however, articulating contrasting tropes of mobility for European immigrants (who were positively associated with industry, permanence, and loyalty) and African North Americans (who were not); they also framed environmental–racial narratives that wedded black labor to tropical plantations and reinforced white claims to the best lands and sociopolitical freedoms of temperate North America. Black colonization to the tropics thus became the ugly twin of Manifest Destiny; black exclusion aided and abetted white settler colonialism from Canada to California.

Amid a growing but qualitatively very uneven field, Tropical Freedom is exemplary in its nuanced use of the interpretive framework of settler colonialism. It highlights how African North Americans, facing the exclusionist paradigm of a white temperate zone, had to couch “claims of black belonging” upon the existing settler foundation of the “physical erasure of indigenous peoples” (20). Asaka demonstrates also the importance of intimacy and domesticity in racialized settler politics. Chapter 3 interrogates how white fears of interracial marriage infused climatic–territorial discourses, undercutting black hopes in post-emancipation Canada; colonization promoters, furthermore, hailed Liberia, in direct opposition to the United States, as the “natural environment” for black families and patriarchal freedom (102). Later chapters show how immigrant labor flows from Europe and legislative Acts – in particular the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law – fostered fresh crises that undermined the legitimacy of free African North Americans on both sides of the US–Canada border.

This is a study of the ideological justifications behind what were, for a whole host of reasons, thoroughly dismal efforts to relocate North American blacks to tropical places: from Liberia to Jamaica to Chiriqui. More discussion of this central tension between vision and reality would have been welcome: to what extent did the recurrent failures undermine, if at all, the “tropical ideology” at work (154)? In the final chapter, Asaka points to the Reconstruction South as the culmination of this ideology. Imagined as a domestic tropic, the postwar South became a site for prescriptive, climatically infused strains of black freedom that sustained white supremacy. This is a fascinating argument, but also a more problematic one. The South differed from the other tropical sites in being part of the continental United States, but also in being home to a large white population, who had their own views about regional identity. The author alludes to “local” discourses that differed from those projected onto the region, but these divergences could be fleshed out in more depth. Postwar promoters of Florida, to give one example, postulated their state as a tropic homeland for white citrus farmers and tourists – with no little success – suggesting other strands of tropical freedom percolating in the settler colonial imagination.

None of which undermines Asaka's arresting conclusion: that, as emancipation gradually and suddenly tore down the edifice of slavery, African North Americans faced climatically codified processes of exclusion that limited, again and again, their opportunities to freedom, land, wealth, and citizenship across the continent. In its breadth of analysis and focussed case studies from Ottawa to Haiti; its transnational scope and archival research (the national archives of Canada and the United Kingdom are impressively mined); and its provoking, persuasive arguments, Tropical Freedom is one of the finest monographs I have read in a long while. It forges new links in transatlantic historiographies of labor, migration, and racial formation, and is essential reading for scholars interested in discourses of race, gender, climate, and settler colonial identity in North America in the era of emancipation.