Lorelle Semley argues that people of African descent in the French Atlantic empire were central actors in the development and enactment of notions of citizenship. She considers geography and temporality broadly, and she both focuses closely on individuals and also considers wide systems of empire. Unlike most studies of French colonialism, the book spans the first and the second French empires, from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, and covers the Caribbean, Africa, and France itself. Through an unwavering attention to colonial spaces and subjects, she demonstrates not only that men and women of color engaged in the struggle for citizenship, but also that, through their actions and their identities, they defined it.

Semley surmounts the methodological challenges of writing a trans-imperial history by weaving the stories of individuals into each chapter. Some are well-known, such as Toussaint Louverture or Gerty Archimede, and some are more obscure, such as Anne Rossignol, a free woman of color from Africa who lived in pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue, and Jean-Jacques Alin, a free man of color born in Martinique who entered the French colonial administration in Senegal. These biographical vignettes by no means form the entirety of each chapter, yet these stories play a significant dual purpose: they both anchor what otherwise could be a narrative that ranged too widely, and they demonstrate with striking clarity the specific ways in which people of color contested, negotiated, and created citizenship in the French empire. They also show the interconnectedness of the empire. The peripatetic individuals Semley highlights circulated around the Atlantic in complex ways: among colonies, and back and forth between colonial and metropolitan spaces. By highlighting such journeys, Semley makes Africa a point of departure and of return. Nothing in the French Atlantic world, she emphasizes, went in a straight line, whether from enslaved to free, subject to citizen, or colony to metropole. Rather, connections and multiplicities defined empire, and also citizenship.

One of the most important interventions that Semley makes is to demonstrate the array of identities claimed by the colonial citizens she highlights, and to show how this heterogeneity predated and influenced the emergence of the concept of citizenship during the Age of Revolutions. The fascinating chapter ‘Signares before citizens’ investigates the political, economic, and cultural roles played by signares, a term that applied to certain elite women in and around Senegal during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As the primary property holders on Gorée, Semley argues, these women made politically radical petitions to the French government that played local officials against metropolitan ones, and that also advanced their own interests. In doing so, they suggested that ‘Africans make good Frenchmen’, thus highlighting the simultaneity of their Frenchness and their Africanness while also complicating assumptions about gender and citizenship (91). Yet people of African descent, Semley claims, could, in the end, only assert their rights through the language of particularities (208). They could and did claim a broad spectrum of identities that pushed citizenship's boundaries, but in accessing those rights they unintentionally reframed themselves as what Semley terms ‘unnatural citizens’ (204).

Throughout the book, Semley disrupts assumptions of a monolithic French universalism that stretches unbroken from the French Revolution to the present. In fact, she shows that men and women of color continually articulated and challenged concepts of citizenship, the form and content of which changed over time. Chapter Three, ‘When blacks broke the chains in the “Little Paris of the Antilles”’ strikes at the heart of this question by analyzing the moment of emancipation in Martinique in 1848, which demonstrated with vivid clarity that Antilleans ‘could be seen as legally French, yet remain second-class citizens (119). Here and elsewhere, Semley makes the timeliness of her historical intervention clear by connecting the past and the present. In Martinique, for example, tensions surrounding citizenship continue to play out in controversies about the present relationship between France and its départements d'outre-mer, and through debates over how to commemorate abolition. Semley's use of oral history allows her to carefully historicize ongoing local disputes throughout.

The book is divided into three sections which roughly correspond to the first empire, abolition and the second empire (a slightly uneasy but intriguing pairing), and post-colonialism. While each chapter could be read or assigned separately, together they build a convincing case that men and women of African descent argued that colonial residents embraced multiple identities as an alternative to universality. Individuals used this multiplicity as a way to claim full citizenship and reject colonial subjecthood. They often made these claims based on their own particularities, for example, as free people of color, landowners, or well-educated elites. Even so, the implications are broad, and these challenges to citizenship prompted French officials — and provoke us — to ‘reimagine who could access rights, in political and in basic human terms’ (314). This book is important reading for scholars of Africa, France, and its empire, transnational history, slavery, intellectual history, human rights, and citizenship.