Hilary Jones frames her study of métis in St Louis, Senegal from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1920s as an effort to recast Senegal's political history through the lenses of racial identity, gender, and culture. She defines métis as espousing a conscious group identity, self-identifying as descendants of an African woman signare and a European merchant or soldier residing in fortified coastal depots St. Louis or Gorée in the mercantile period. As the capital city of the fledgling colony until 1902, St. Louis was at the center of contestations over the meanings of colonialism as the French sought to centralize governance. However, in their social organization, cultural practices, and electoral politics, métis men and women insisted upon themselves as citizens of the French republic and cultivated a social and political branch of civil society.

Chapter One outlines the emergence of the town in the eighteenth-century period of mercantile trade. Jones emphasizes that early St Louis consisted of Afro-European households presided over by signares and that African women defined the emergence of urban society and the interactions between the French and peoples of lower Senegal. Chapter Two focuses on ‘the golden age’ of métis society: 1820–70. The male sons of signares prospered as dominant middlemen in the thriving gum trade in the first half of the nineteenth century. In spite of the collapse of this trade in the 1840s, Jones contends that métis men of particular families maintained wealth through operating independent trading houses and employment in French businesses.

Chapters Three and Four trace the social and biological reproduction of métis society during the golden age. Jones traces the development of a ‘self-conscious métis society’ through practices of endogamy, French civil marriage, Catholicism, and in adapting French bourgeois cultural sensibilities in dress and household architecture. Moreover, métis espoused dual identity as both French and African, speaking Wolof, maintaining kin ties, and interacting with Muslim traders. Chapter Four focuses on education, associations, and the independent press. Métis men became members of French associations such as the Alliance Française and the Masonic Lodge and created cercles and mutual aid societies. Jones lays out the fascinating story of twenty men who pursued education at a lycée in Bordeaux between 1875–81, a thread that invites further research, and the production of newspapers that circulated between St Louis and Bordeaux. Jones emphasizes the role of African women in cultivating an ethos of respectability that bolstered métis claims to French education and culture.

Chapters Five, Six, and Seven focus on the period from 1870–1920. Chapter Five examines the formation of an active civil society and electoral politics. Métis men worked in influential institutions such as courts and banks. New local councils had the power to determine the colony's budget, set trading regulations and the construction of roads and railways – métis men dominated in the rolls of elected delegates. Though métis women could not vote or run for office, they influenced elections and generated economic resources through ‘the notion of republican womanhood’, a tantalizing thread that Jones does not fully substantiate. Chapter Six most fully elaborates on what Jones calls the ‘active citizenry’ of métis men in urban politics from the 1870s through 1890, focusing primarily on the political careers of men from two families. Métis elected officials shifted in seeing themselves as representatives of French authority, forwarding their own interests as members of a merchant lobby, or protecting the profits of Senegalese traders from the French. Jones alludes to debates about trade and access to wealth that took place in newspapers and council debates, yet the chapter is a slim sixteen pages that leaves the reader wanting more of the specificities of these contestations. Chapter Seven turns to the years of 1890–1920, in which the French reduced the power and mandate of local councils and discredited powerful métis merchants and assemblymen whom they viewed as dangerous to French interests, effectively diminishing the claims to republican citizenship of métis. Furthermore, educated sons of Muslim traders and originaires sought to lessen métis monopoly over politics and wealth. After 1920, métis no longer dominated urban electoral politics.

Jones's book is the result of extensive research in state, parish, and private archives and newspapers in Dakar and St Louis, Bordeaux, and Paris. She produces family histories and genealogies from oral interviews. Her book lays out the porous boundaries between French and African cultures and how métis fashioned their own conceptions of civilized society. The book expands the recent historiography on the meanings of the term ‘métis’ beyond the perspectives of French colonial society. Furthermore, Jones makes the important contribution of arguing for the ways in which women and household politics continued to influence the public sphere even as the French bolstered African men and state institutions as the locus of political power and wealth.