This book performs a vital role in challenging and developing the ideas surrounding, and emerging from, Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic. From its opening, it establishes itself as an important volume for postcolonial and literary studies, but also, more broadly, for understanding the global impact of modernity and modernization. For Beyond the Black Atlantic rigorously questions a number of assumptions arising from the West's claim of cultural and economic hegemony. The story of the West as the “sole agent or centre of modernization” (2) is undermined by virtue of a series of examples – taken from a range of literary, cultural and economic contexts from the precolonial and colonial past to the postcolonial present – querying traditional notions of centre and periphery, Western development and Third World backwardness, and “the classical theme that technological innovation has been a tragedy for the cultures it transforms” (7). While the injustices of capitalist modernity are recognized, the essays also highlight its transformative potential. Elleke Boehmer's essay on Solomon Plaatje and Mohandas Gandhi, for instance, highlights the way technologies were exploited by anticolonial movements to establish networks across national borders to generate a sense of “collective power” (49).

By giving a “more constellated, interactive, and dialogic picture of the colonial world and of peripheral modernities” than has been previously imagined (Boehmer 50), Boehmer, along with the other writers in this collection, move beyond Gilroy's focus on the Atlantic, to address the effects of modernity across Africa to the Indian Ocean and the Indian diaspora. Additionally, in the essays by Stephen Shapiro and Gauri Viswanathan, parallel transactions between the West and the peripheries are uncovered which problematize “penetrationist notions of domination” (Shapiro 130). The volume raises a number of issues for future research, ranging from considering colonialism's encounter with modernity in similar terms to those Gilroy uses for the black diaspora – as a “state of emergency” (Chrisman 37) – to the need to study “comparative capitalisms” in light of the fact that there is “nothing intrinsically western about capitalism” (Shapiro 130–31).

Postcolonialism has repeatedly been criticized, by Arif Dirlik, amongst others, for the way it disavows history by prioritizing culture over structures. This collection cannot be faced with such a charge. Not only does it historicize spatialized conceptions of modernity, but, by virtue of challenging the dominance of the West in economic, cultural and technological terms, it brings the very idea of unidirectional globalization into question.