Emily Clark has painstakingly peeled away the many layers of history that weigh down and obscure our appreciation of the experience of women of color and mixed racial heritage who were characterized variously in the nineteenth century as “quadroons,” “octoroons,” “mûlattresses,” and “mulata.” Other works of literary criticism, art history, and social history have restricted the scholarly conversation on this topic by focusing narrowly on certain types of nineteenth century sources in ways that strand the topic in an inadequate contextualized framework and leave the reader with an artificially coherent yet insufficiently complex understanding. Even lesser works of history that accept at face value nineteenth century “observations” about the women who have been designated by these terms—often spread by illustrious elites with cursory or no personal experience to draw on—have done nothing to undermine the salacious underpinnings of the very idea of the “quadroon,” and instead have repeated tropes that deserve skeptical interrogation. Still other scholars have drawn sweeping generalizations from an exclusive concentration in New Orleans, producing a reification of this city as a foreign place of racial and sexual intrigue in works that divorce the city from the main narratives of United States history, and in the process buffer and enisle mainstream United States nineteenth century history from the pervasiveness that characterized the sexual exploitation of enslaved and free women of color. Clark's work stands out from all previous historical treatments of this topic by falling into none of these traps. Instead, Clark offers the reader and student of history a model of what the best interdisciplinary methodology can produce in the way of analysis, and new insights into one of the most slippery and treacherous topics in United States history.

This book of history contains several chapters of specific interest to those interested in law and the ways that legal realities dovetail with social, cultural, and economic forces. Immediately in the prologue, we are treated to an untangling of the convoluted logic behind the legal and “scientific” expressions concerning racial classification emerging from the American Revolution, and becoming more striking than ever in the early National Period. As will be the case throughout this sophisticated work, Clark is not satisfied with the usual lampooning of explanations such as those of Thomas Jefferson whose algebraic calculations continue to boggle and outrage the contemporary mind. However satisfying it may be to belittle the mental gymnastics and hypocrisies of various founding fathers, Clark does not leave us helplessly marooned in the irrelevance that our own smugness on this point might otherwise lend to the issue of the production of race as a form of power-knowledge. Instead, we are treated with a brilliant connecting of the dots between political realities of nation building, foreign policy, and international trading networks as these fed into more local currents of political jockeying in the Eastern seaboard centers of power such as Philadelphia and Baltimore, and emerged in the law as ways of containing potential disruption to elites' status and power.

Clark's first chapter, on “The Philadelphia Quadroon,” nails down the complicated interweave of international economics, war, and politics that put pressure on the legal system in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Clark's deft weighing of the legal recourses, political wrangling, and even gossip networks that competing elites accessed in order to provide reassurance in this time of upheaval in Caribbean slavery and the international slave trade is a tour de force of historical detective work, and succeeds in displacing the nod to transnationalism that topics on United States history typically receive.

The book's middle chapters shift our attention from the Atlantic seaboard to port cities along the Caribbean and to the usual central figure in considerations of this topic, the city of New Orleans. Again, however, we find no typical narrative here, and no stone is left unturned in methodological breadth, resulting in new ways of thinking about the relationship of racial classification and legal identities to social and economic developments. Chapters Two, Three, and Four overlay demographic shifts in New Orleans tied to the economic vicissitudes of slavery and explosive politics in nearby Haiti and Saint-Domingue, on top of marital trends and inter-racial arrangements in the form of “plaçage” and the practice of single white men hiring women as ménagères to compensate for a drastically unequal sex ratio. The continuum between these forms of employment, exploitation, and enslavement are carefully distinguished from street and brothel prostitution, always with an eye to the relevance that such categorization had in its own cultural context.

Chapters Five and Six firmly cut off the oxygen to any resuscitation of the tantalizing yet exploitative images of New Orleans' women of color purveyed by so-called “observers” and novelists from the nineteenth century and beyond. Clark unseats the many imagistic yet false ideas about the lives, choices, and options facing women of mixed race who were sought after for both sexual and nonsexual employments, with and without pay or remuneration. Her epilogue brings her trenchant analysis of the continuing salience of this topic up to the present day tendency to link New Orleans with an unthinking history of the sexualized “quadroon.”

Clark's book, more than any other I know of, puts to rest an altogether too- familiar public history campaign that has fed a touristic imagination of New Orleans for almost two centuries. Her book has served to make the “American quadroon” truly “strange” to the contemporary reader, thus allowing the experiences of women of color tarred with that label under slavery and since to be known and appreciated on their terms.