Women and men sent to the Americas from West Africa in the first half of the nineteenth century experienced warfare, dislocation and enslavement during the fall of Oyo, the expansion of Dahomey and the jihad that led to the rise of the Sokoto caliphate. In his latest work, Barcia provocatively suggests that scholars of slave resistance in the Americas have misinterpreted West African-led movements in Bahia, Brazil and Cuba during that time as slave revolts, uprisings and insurrections. He contends that these were acts of war whose practices West Africans (the Yoruba, known as Nagô in Brazil and Lucumí in Cuba) – most of them recently arrived from war-torn lands – had transferred across the Atlantic. Through this lens, these movements become military actions whose ‘uninterrupted perpetuation’ from their homelands becomes evidence for the ‘direct links and continuities’ between West Africa and Bahia and Cuba.

The chapters take the reader across the Atlantic, from politics and warfare in West Africa in Chapter 1 to enslavement, the African slave trade and the Middle Passage in Chapter 2. The experiences of the new arrivals to Bahia and Cuba in Chapter 3 are followed by detailed discussions in Chapters 4 and 5 of West African warfare – its organisation, strategies, weaponry and war paraphernalia – in the Africans’ destinations. The uneven source material translates into chapters that read quite differently. For the introduction and first two chapters, which lay the necessary groundwork in early nineteenth-century West African history, Barcia relies heavily on existing historiography and employs a plethora of proper nouns that may overwhelm readers who lack detailed knowledge of the subject matter. The book begins to get into its stride with Barcia's analysis of the Mixed Commission records. Those interested in the presence of Muslims among the West Africans sent to Cuba, not just Bahia, will be intrigued by the author's evidence. The book is clearly at its strongest and most compelling when Barcia analyses the depositions of West African slaves in Cuba. The rich discussion of their military strategies, dress and weaponry, as well as of their language – especially their repeated use of ‘the war’ – provides ample evidence of the connections across the Atlantic. His parallel analysis of Bahian cases relies heavily on existing scholarship. Taken together they show the striking similarity between military strategies employed by West Africans in the two locations.

Further discussion of some topics would have enriched the book. The most salient of these concerns what the West Africans wanted to accomplish. While Barcia makes a convincing case that they were waging war, what then? Here he is curiously circumspect. He states that, as cited in many depositions, a frequent objective of the West African participants was to ‘kill all the white men, to marry the white women, to take over the land, and to run away to the land of the blacks where they could be free’ (p. 100). Yet while such statements are clearly inflected by race and offer tantalising hints of the political vision the West Africans harboured for what was to come after the war, Barcia delves no further. Elsewhere, he touches upon the possibility of jihad but then concludes that ethnic alliances were more important than religion. Towards the end he mentions a Lucumí who told a Cuban slave that ‘they did not want to be slaves anymore, and that they would fight until achieving freedom or that they would die trying’ (p. 155). Surely his West African past must have shaped his views on captivity and freedom as well as warfare, but these topics are left unexplored. Perhaps a discussion of ‘freedom’ veers too close to the Revolutionary scholarship the author is critiquing, but it also promises an exciting avenue for analysis that more fully accounts for African histories.

Barcia's focus on warfare enriches our ways of conceptualising African diasporic and Atlantic world connections, complementing statistical analyses and the circulation of news and people. Yet while the similarities between military movements in Bahia, Cuba and West Africa are remarkable, the reader is left without a detailed understanding of the specific contexts to which these people were brought. The author evocatively highlights the similarity of the flora, constellations and climate between their homelands and destinations that enabled a sense of continuity amidst their violent dislocation. But they also entered a new kind of slave society defined by racial hierarchy, one that could not have been lost even on the most recently arrived, or bozales, his protagonists. Some found themselves working in the city streets; others were sent to plantations or to smaller households with a few slaves. These and other local details and nuances that would have impacted their experiences and ideas just as much as their shared pasts were muted in the multiple examples spanning Bahia and Cuba.

The author also employs the expression ‘African men and women’ throughout his text. Women (and children) and gender, however, receive only fleeting discussion (pp. 119; 129–30). That warfare and enslavement in West Africa impacted the lives of both women and men is clear. Barcia's evidence, as is the case with many of the depositions, is understandably overwhelmingly male, and this is also true of the evidence for the majority of slave uprisings throughout the Americas. Rather than obliquely mentioning African women throughout the text, then, the author would have benefited from addressing the gender imbalance of the sources, and participation in the wars, from the outset.

West African Warfare in Bahia and Cuba is a welcome counterpoint to the booming scholarship on slavery, emancipation and revolution in the Atlantic world, which continues to focus on the French, Haitian and American revolutions and their impact while paying comparatively little attention to African histories, peoples and ideologies. Those interested in Atlantic world revolutions and slavery will be challenged and stimulated by this book, which contends that West African traditions and knowledge were as revolutionary and political as those associated with the Enlightenment. Barcia's book opens the way for enriching dialogues between Africanists and Latin Americanists.