Colonial Louisiana has proven a useful foundation for Atlantic scholarship. Encompassing the diasporic movements of a wide variety of people from across the Atlantic world, including France, Spain, Africa, the West Indies, Germany, and the surrounding territories of the United States, it became the site of an unprecedented convergence of cultures, laws, and customs. Choosing to “focus on the colonial period while surveying its legacies in the first decades of the nineteenth century” (8), Cécile Vidal articulates how this collection of essays exemplifies the idea that Louisiana in the long eighteenth century represented a “crossroads.”

Though predominantly localized to New Orleans, which bore witness to numerous “circulations” and “exchanges” (concepts that reach to the core of this book), it nevertheless stimulates an important and visibly engaged conversation about Louisiana as a meeting point in Atlantic history. The conversations that each contributor has with the next on the themes that they bring to light, the sources that they have deployed, and the analytical approaches that they adopt are seamlessly interwoven. Equally, each essay offers a unique insight into the variety of possible existences achievable in “Atlantic” Louisiana, envisioning the interconnections between whites (acknowledging and reconciling the transitions between French and Spanish rule), free people of color, and the enslaved, and considering the significance of social interactions, economic power, community formation and ideological influences (such as the Catholic Church.)

Of particular interest are Alexandre Dubé's essay on Louisiana's Plume, exploring the meritocratic nature of the Navy in colonial Louisiana, as it offered opportunities for advancement that were inconceivable in the metropole, and Sophie White's essay on the informal economies of slaves and poor whites, which adopts an interdisciplinary approach to highlight how the transatlantic slave trade inculcated a culture of mass consumption that spawned imaginative strategies of (re)production and exchange. These essays both set up an important discussion about class in Louisiana and the currencies that enabled people (even those at the lowest levels of society) to achieve a degree of social autonomy within an economy that, paradoxically, served to perpetuate a system of exploitation.

The subject of race and its articulations in the evolution of the colony are also of central significance, and each essay carefully weighs emergent ideas and languages of race against the concept of Atlantic Louisiana, which, during the period of coverage, was subject to external influences and internal shifts. The text, as a whole, adopts a highly nuanced approach to this problem, examining the complexity of interracial relationships and challenging previously held misconceptions about their nature and frequency, and considering the changing environments in which relationships of different types flourished. Expanding on the excellent work that she has done on representations of the “American Quadroon,” Emily Clark also considers the centrality of marriage to communities of African descent in New Orleans. Where the notion that New Orleans spawned a “three-caste society” has been somewhat overdetermined in the past, these essays complicate our understanding and stress the importance of distinguishing the peculiarity of certain relationships to Louisiana from assumptions about their ubiquity. As Vidal points out in her essay on Caribbean Louisiana and métissage, we need to be able to “measure the limits of the cultural transfers and exchange revealed by ‘connected history’” (145).

Although such insights expand the conversation, there are few deviations from conventional archival history throughout this body of work, and so these narratives are filtered (in the main) through official and institutional records, and documents authored largely by white elites, thereby obscuring the voices of those who were less equipped to leave their historical “trace.” Admittedly, Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec's essay explores the difficulty in recuperating the sentiments at the heart of such data, and imagines the possibilities for those interesting fragments that provide little context, but this work is highly speculative.

In addition, while this project looks at Louisiana through an Atlantic lens, its scope is not fully realized. Despite some allusions to the fact that Louisiana, during the period of analysis, was largely Indian Territory, and some treatment of the Louisiana frontier and borderlands, it could go much further here. That said, Sylvia Frey's conclusion acknowledges the important work that is yet to be done in this field, suggesting that “Atlantic Louisiana” is a project with which scholars should continue to engage, and recommending a “cross-pollination of disciplines” (204) in future studies. This book advances an ethics of transnationalism in approaches to Louisiana history and beyond, and showcases some interesting interventions in this area of study from across the present Atlantic world.